This article explains what psychology studies, what methodologies it uses, and how it seeks to establish its scientific identity in order to answer questions about human behavior and psychological processes.
At one point or another in your life, you’ve probably asked yourself why you love, why you rebel against your teachers in adolescence, why your child smiles, and many other questions. Have you ever wished you had a cool answer to each of them? There is a field of study that can provide cool and satisfying answers to everyday questions or questions that arise spontaneously. This field is sometimes defined as the science of the mind and sometimes as the science of behavior. What is it? It’s psychology. Psychology is the study of why and how organisms behave the way they do. You want to know more about what psychology is, don’t you?
First, let’s take a look at what psychology targets. The questions above are only a small part of what psychology studies. Psychology has a very broad scope, ranging from studies related to biology, anthropology, and sociology to animal and human behavior, conscious experience, and collective action. For example, we study whether stimulating the brain causes pain, what we perceive as ambiguous visual stimuli, whether children have an innate fear of heights, what is the meaning of courtship behavior, and why, in a fire in a theater, there are more crush deaths than burns.
Second, let’s talk about the challenges of psychology. Psychology is often thought of as the study of why person “A” hates class “B,” but that’s only the applied side of psychology. Psychology is a science, and like any science, it explores the underlying, general principles that different events share. Once these principles are discovered, they can be applied not only to the case of person A disliking class B, but also to any case of person A disliking any class P.
Third, we’ll briefly review the various fields of study in psychology, the science of the mind that studies behavior and mental processes. The basic areas of study include perceptual psychology, which deals with issues of human sensation and perception; learning psychology, which studies the acquisition and memory of common behaviors; linguistic psychology, which deals with how we acquire and understand language; physiological psychology, which examines the relationship between an organism’s neurobiological structures and processes and its behavior; and neuroscience, which studies the relationship between the brain and behavior, animal psychology, which studies the comparative study of animals and humans; social psychology, which studies how interactions with other people affect attitudes and behavior; personality psychology, which studies general laws about individual differences and the knowledge and techniques needed to understand specific individuals; and developmental psychology, which studies the formation of individual behavior and the physical and psychological growth of humans from birth to old age.
Next, there is clinical and counseling psychology, which studies adaptive problems of an applied nature, industrial psychology for management, engineering psychology for the ease of use of machines, school psychology and educational psychology, and the field of psychology continues to expand to include forensic psychology, environmental psychology, and even the computer field, which deals with artificial intelligence.
Fourth, learn about the different research methodologies in psychology. In order to apply psychology to a specific subject, it is necessary to understand how it is studied. Psychology includes experimental research, which involves setting up dependent and independent variables and conducting experiments under strict control to determine cause and effect; observational research, which involves identifying and describing the behavior of specific objects (but be careful because it can be subjective); survey research, which involves carefully constructed questionnaires or interviews; testing, which involves psychological tests like the MMPI; and case studies, which involve understanding the behavior of people with concussions.
Now that we’ve covered psychology in general, it’s worth mentioning psychology as a discipline. As a discipline, psychology is a science that uses the scientific method whenever possible. However, there are some areas where the scientific method cannot be used, which can be seen as lacking a scientific component. This is due to the fact that, despite the fact that the object of study must be objectively proven to reveal a scientific fact, the processes of the mind, which are the subject of psychology, are invisible and can only be inferred from the behavior of the subject. In addition, psychology deals with the subjective experiences of individuals, which are difficult to quantify or measure. This is why psychology is sometimes criticized as unscientific and why it is different from the natural sciences, but you should never forget that psychologists try to be as scientific as possible.
It’s also important to understand that the human psychology and behavior that psychology studies inevitably cannot be examined in terms of just one branch of psychology (e.g., perception, personality, development, etc.), so when psychologists construct theories or apply them to the real world, they are forced to take an interdisciplinary approach and examine them from multiple perspectives, often in conjunction with other branches of psychology or other disciplines. Because of this nature of psychology as a discipline, its scientific identity is sometimes considered to be in its infancy, and some even argue that it is not a discipline at all.
Now that you have a rough idea of what psychology is, you should be able to understand that it is still developing, as mentioned above, and that the human mind, the object of study in psychology, can be likened to a puzzle board of unknown size. Psychology is about putting the pieces of this puzzle together to form a complete picture.
