Description
Why should you study psychology? The answer to that question is quite straightforward. Psychological research has immediate and crucial applications to important issues of everyday experience: your physical and mental health, your ability to form and sustain close relationships, and your capacity for learning and personal growth. One of the foremost goals of this text is to highlight the personal relevance and social significance of psychological expertise.
Every semester when I begin to teach, I am faced with students who enter an introductory psychology class with some very specific questions in mind. Sometimes those questions emerge from their own experience (“What should I do if I think my mother is mentally ill?” “Will this course teach me how to improve my grades?”); sometimes those questions emerge from the type of psychological information that is communicated through the media (“Should I worry when people use cell phones while they’re driving?” “Is it possible to tell when people are lying?”) The challenge of introductory psychology is to bring the products of scientific research to bear on questions that matter to you.
Research in psychology provides a continuous stream of new information about the basic mechanisms that govern mental and behavioral processes. As new ideas replace or modify old ideas, psychologists are continually intrigued and challenged by the many fascinating pieces of the puzzle of human nature. I hope that, by the end of this journey through psychology, you too will cherish your store of psychological knowledge.
Foremost in the journey will be a scientific quest for understanding. We will inquire about the how, what, when, and why of human behavior and about the causes and consequences of behaviors you observe in yourself, in other people, and in animals. We will consider why you think, feel, and behave as you do. What makes you uniquely different from all other people? Yet why do you often behave so much like others? Are you molded by heredity, or are you shaped more by personal experiences? How can aggression and altruism, love and hate, and mental illness and creativity exist side by side in this complex creature—the human animal? In this chapter, we ponder how and why all these types of questions have become relevant to psychology’s goals as a discipline.
What Makes Psychology UniqUe?
To appreciate the uniqueness and unity of psychology, you must consider the way psychologists define the field and the goals they bring to their research and applications. I hope you will begin to think like a psychologist. This first section will give you a strong idea of what that might mean.
Definitions
Many psychologists seek answers to this fundamental question: What is human nature? Psychology answers this question by looking at processes that occur within individuals as well as forces that arise within the physical and social environment. In this light, we’ll define psychology as the scientific study of the behavior of individuals and their mental processes. Let’s explore the critical parts of this definition: scientific, behavior, individual, and mental.
The scientific aspect of psychology requires that psychological conclusions be based on evidence collected according to the principles of the scientific method. The scientific method consists of a set of orderly steps used to analyze and solve problems. This method uses objectively collected information as the factual basis for drawing conclusions.
Behavior is the means by which organisms adjust to their environment. Behavior is action. The subject matter of psychology largely consists of the observable behavior of humans and other species of animals. Smiling, crying, running, hitting, talking, and touching are some obvious examples of behavior you can observe. Psychologists examine what the individual does and how the individual goes about doing it within a given behavioral setting and in the broader social or cultural context.
The subject of psychological analysis is most often an individual—a newborn infant, a college student adjusting to life in a dormitory, or a woman coping with the stress of her husband’s deterioration from Alzheimer’s disease. However, the subject might also be a chimpanzee learning to use symbols to communicate, a white rat navigating a maze, or a sea slug responding to a danger signal. An individual might be studied in its natural habitat or in the controlled conditions of a research laboratory.
Many researchers in psychology also recognize that they cannot understand human actions without also understanding mental processes, the workings of the human mind. Much human activity takes place as private, internal events—thinking, planning, reasoning, creating, and dreaming. Many psychologists believe that mental processes represent the most important aspect of psychological inquiry. As you shall soon see, psychological investigators have devised ingenious techniques to study mental events and processes—to make these private experiences public.
The combination of these concerns defines psychology as a unique field. Within the social sciences, psychologists focus largely on the behavior of individuals in various settings, whereas sociologists study social behavior of groups or institutions, and anthropologists focus on the broader context of behavior in different cultures. Even so, psychologists draw broadly from the insights of other scholars. Psychologists share many interests with researchers in biological sciences, especially with those who study brain processes and the biochemical bases of behavior. As part of cognitive science,