This includes concepts concerning the processes or mechanisms that produce behavior and experience as well as those concerning the ways in which behavior and experience contribute to survival and reproduction. While psychologists' concepts apply to a broad range of animals, I especially want students to grasp their application to human action and experience. Concepts are cognitive tools that enable us to discover or extract the meaning and significance of the events we experience. Because human events are complex, they can reveal more than one kind of meaning or significance. Our concepts are like stains that highlight particular features of events while obscuring others.
Most students approach human events with a humanistic set of concepts.
Their understanding of their own or others behaviors focuses either on the phenomenology of the actors involved, i.e., what they intended or how they felt, or on the evaluative implications of the actions, i.e., their relevance to some standard of good and evil. At a more sophisticated level students may seek a hermeneutical understanding of the action, i.e., the relevance of the action to broad cultural themes. While humanistic concepts are necessary for living informed lives, they are not sufficient. They fail to highlight the ways in which human action and experience are part of the natural world, subject to the same determinants as the rest of the universe. Helping students locate action in the world of natural causation is the distinctive mission of teachers of psychology.