What exactly is psychology?
Bringing clarity into psychological science
Psychology is an extremely misunderstood science. It’s funny, when most people are confronted with physics or chemistry, they claim to be “not smart enough” to understand it. When the same people are confronted with psychology, all of a sudden, they seem to know everything. I believe it’s because the average person probably doesn’t think about the basic laws of physics on a daily basis, which is why they think it’s way too hard for them to understand. But people think about themselves and the people around them all the time, which is why they think they’ve got it all figured out.
I’ve been studying psychology for more than five years now, and it’s still surprising to me to experience time and time again that most people lack the basic knowledge of what the field of psychology actually encompasses. Most posts I see on social media, which claim to be based on “psychology”, are drenched in popular science and only represent half the truth, if any. And I get it, those “10 Things You Need To Do To Be Happy” posts are intriguing and easily shareable. We all want the secret sauce to lead a happier, more fulfilled life. But it’s not that easy as implementing a 10-step program and all of a sudden, you’re floating on cloud 9 all the time, with all your earthly worries forgotten. It’s just not how it works and I want to go deeper than that. I felt, and still feel, that there’s a serious knowledge gap when it comes to psychological science (or science in general) and how it generates knowledge about the human condition and experience.
That’s why, about two years ago, I decided to start an educational podcast — All Things Psychology — , where I dive deep into the topic of psychology to give listeners a better understanding of what psychology is and does and how it came to be. It’s a podcast for those who are eager to learn more about it, be it laypersons, students, or anyone else who’s interested in psychology. It took me this long to finally get up the guts and actually do it, and here we are.
This blog can be seen as an addition to the podcast, where I will put every episode into writing, without it being a 1-to-1 transcript. It’s more of an additional resource for everyone who 1) has a hearing impairment, 2) doesn’t like podcasts (how dare you) or 3) wants to read up on what they’ve already heard about.
This first post serves as an introduction into the topic, where I will give a definition of psychology and a short history overview. I will explain the four goals and the seven perspectives of psychology, and how psychology differentiates itself from other related fields and sciences. To round everything up, I will make a short detour to the WEIRD bias.
So, let’s get right into it, shall we?
Introduction
The word psychology is derived from the two greek words, psyche which means „breath“, „spirit“, or „soul“, and logía, which translates to „study of“ or „research“. Roughly translated, psychology therefore means „study of the soul“. To be quite frank, this translation is more than misleading. Psychology does not literally study the soul. The soul is not a proven concept that can easily be studied. A better translation, in my opinion, would be study of the mind, but that’s no less confusing. So I will provide you with a definition of Psychology which is much more understandable and hopefully more digestible. The most common definition of Psychology is the following:
Psychology is the scientific study of the behavior and the cognitive processes of individuals and groups.
Let’s look at this definition more closely. Scientific study here means basing psychological conclusions on evidence collected according to the principles of scientific methods. Scientific methods, on the other hand, are ordered steps for the analysis and solution of problems, and objectively collected information serve as a factual basis of conclusions. Cognitive processes are the ways in which the brain works. Observable behavior, cognitive processes, as well as individuals and groups are the subject of psychology, which means that psychology studies and concerns itself with them. So what this definition means is that psychology concerns itself with individuals and groups, how they behave under different circumstances and how the human brain works in these situations. And it does all that by applying step by step guides to collect objective information, from which conclusions can then be drawn.
Now that we know the definition of psychology and what it means, we can go on to the short history overview.
Short History Overview
Now we will take a quick look on how psychology developed into a discipline in its own right. The next couple blog posts will go much more into detail on this, so for now I will just give an overview.
The ancient civilizations of Greece, Egypt, China, and India were one of the first to engage in philosophical thoughts of psychology. They addressed mental disorders, such as depression and theorized on their causes. They also developed some interesting ideas about the human mind and the soul. Ancient China was the very place where psychological testing and diagnostics first took place in form of aptitude tests for the military and where allegedly the first psychological experiment was carried out.
Medieval muslim physicians were one of the first to try treating mental disorders. The polymath Abu Zayd Ahemd Ibn Sahl al-Balkhi realized that body and mind are interconnected and that the body gets sick if the psyche is sick. If the psyche is sick or in imbalance, this can lead to a variety of symptoms, including anxiety. He also described two types of depression for which he proposed treatments, one caused by known reasons, the other caused by unknown reasons. The polymath Avicenna also worked on treatments for mental disorders and described several neuropsychiatric disorders, like hallucinations, mania, and dementia.
Later, in the 17th and 18th century, the philosophers René Descartes, John Locke, and David Hume had a great influence on the philosophical form of psychology and significantly impacted the development of experimental psychology. In 1732, the German philosopher Christian Wolff and one of the most important Enlightenment thinkers in Europe, was the very person who coined the word psychology for popular use and was the first to make a distinction between empirical psychology and rational psychology. In England, the term „mental philosophy“ was replaced by the word „psychology“ in the middle of the 19th century. In 1854, Gustav Theodor Fechner established the field of psychophysics, which found that human perception of a stimulus varies according to its intensity, known as the Weber-Fechner law. This is when experimental psychology officially began. A couple years later, in 1879 Wilhelm Wundt founded the first psychological laboratory worldwide in Leipzig, Germany, which established psychology once and for all as an independent academic science and brought experimental psychology into the world.
I realize this is a very dense and short version of the rather long history of psychology, but I hope it gives you at least an overview over how psychology developed over the millennia. In the next couple of posts, I will zoom in on the central figures I mentioned here and their contemporaries in a lot more detail. But for now, we will move on to the goals of psychology.
The 4 Goals of Psychology
Now that we’ve seen how Psychology developed until its implementation as an independent empirical science, it is important to know what the field of psychology and psychologists actually set out to do. Generally, psychology has four goals, namely describing, explaining, predicting, and controlling.
1 So I’ll give you an example of how this might look like. Let’s say you want to know more about people’s behavior in coffee shops. As a first step, describing, you would maybe go into a coffee shop and observe how people behave. Do they form a neat line when waiting, how long do they take to decide what to order, do they smile at the barista, how much do they tip, do they take their coffee to go or do they drink it right there, etc. There’s a lot to observe here and you are merely objectively describing what you see.
2 The second step is explaining. Here you generate a theory and derive hypotheses from it of why people are behaving the way they are. In the coffee shop example you could ask yourself why people order more lattes than cappuccinos. Maybe lattes are cheaper than cappuccinos or maybe they just taste better. Or you could ask yourself why certain people prefer to drink their coffee in the coffee shop instead of taking it to go. It might be that the coffee shop has a nice outdoor space where people can hang out and enjoy their coffee or something else along those lines.
3 Now that we have explained why people behave a certain way, we can try to predict their future behavior. Staying with the coffee shop example, you could predict that when its sunny and warm outside, people will likely drink their coffee in the outdoor area of the coffee shop. When it’s rainy or cold, people will prefer to take their coffee to go and drink it on their way to work.
4 Controlling is the last, and arguably, the most important step. If we want our guests to drink their coffee at the coffee shop, we could make the coffee cheaper if it is consumed right there. Or when we know that people are less likely to drink their coffee at the shop when it’s rainy outside, we could make the inside of the coffee shop more cozy so people prefer to stay.
Now, the word controlling has kind of a bad connotation and I would rather call it influencing. It’s not about controlling people to do something they don’t want to do. It’s more about influencing people in a direction that is hopefully more healthy for them or in some instances, like our coffee shop example, more advantageous for us. In therapy, for example, the goal oftentimes is to alleviate symptoms of mental disorders. The therapist’s job is to guide their patients in a positive direction by giving them the tools to overcome illness. Of course, in marketing, where psychologists often work in, this goal of influencing people can be taken advantage of, but that’s a whole other story that we will not touch on in this post.
The 7 Perspectives of Psychology
There are seven broad perspectives on psychology, which I will explain in turn:
- Psychodynamic perspective
- Behaviorist perspective
- Humanistic perspective
- Cognitive perspective
- Biological perspective
- Evolutionary perspective
- Sociocultural Perspective
1 First there’s the psychodynamic perspective. This perspective was coined by the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, who probably most of you have at least heard of. It states that behavior is driven by internal and external forces. Internal forces here mean hereditary instincts or biological drives, for example. External forces could be certain rules, morals, and values imposed by the society we live in. Those internal and external forces often are in conflict because they want different things. So the purpose of any given behavior is to reduce this conflict.
Let’s say you are at a birthday party and there’s chocolate cake right in front of you. Your internal forces tell you to eat the cake, it looks delicious, you are hungry, and you love chocolate. On the other hand, your external forces may tell you not to eat the chocolate cake. You already had cheesecake, and every guest is allowed to eat only one piece of cake. So the question is to eat or not to eat. To reduce the conflict between the internal and external forces at play here, you could either give in to your instincts and eat the chocolate cake or you could refrain from eating the cake because technically, you’re not allowed to. Both choices would reduce the conflict. A third option could be to just leave the table so you don’t have to look at the cake anymore and the internal and external forces will seize to play tricks on your mind anymore.
In the psychodynamic perspective, behaviors can also arise from the subconscious, which are not always rational and cannot be explained by pure logic. This was an entirely new way of thinking for that time, which made Freud rather unpopular amongst his peers.
2 The second perspective is the behaviorist perspective, which was established by John Watson. This perspective examines the environmental conditions and people’s responses to environmental stimuli and their consequences. Behaviorism puts an emphasis on the experiment and clearly defined variables. Some concepts you may have heard about that are classically behavioristic are conditioning and positive reinforcement, where a desired behavior is rewarded so it will be displayed more often.
3 Then there’s the humanistic perspective. It states that people are inherently good and have free will. Every person strives for self-actualization, which means positive mental and physical health and development. The humanistic perspective takes a more holistic approach in the sense that a person’s mind, body, and behavior, as well as the society and culture they live in is taken into consideration to get to a real understanding of an individual person.
4 The cognitive perspective studies cognitive processes like thoughts, attention, memory, perception, language, problem-solving, and decision making. Behavior is oriented on the subjective internal world. Thoughts are both causes and results of actions. In contrast to the behaviorist perspective, the cognitive perspective states that behavior is not only learned through environmental stimuli but can emerge from completely new ways of thinking.
5 The biological perspective sees origins of actions and experiences on the workings of genes, the brain, the nervous system, and the endocrine system. A typical research questions might be: „Which chemicals in your brain are released when you are hugging your friend?“ Or „Which underlying chemical processes in your nervous system are responsible for the feeling of anger?“. Researchers who take the biological perspective oftentimes work in fields such as behavioral or cognitive neuroscience.
6 The evolutionary perspective is based on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. It states that adaptive cognitive and physical skills have developed over a period of millions of years. It studies the environmental conditions under which the human brain developed in the course of its evolution. Evolutionary psychologists look as behavior as something that developed over millions of years, during a time when humans still lived as hunter-gatherer groups. A research question might be: „How did our ability to emphasize develop over the course of evolution?“
7 The sociocultural perspective studies intercultural differences of origins and consequences of behavior. It is an answer to the often stated critique, and to be honest fact, that psychological research mainly focuses on white middle-class North-Americans and Europeans and therefore puts into perspective the generalizations made about human behavior. This is related to the WEIRD bias, on which we will have a closer look later in this episode. Typical research questions could be how culture and language changes people’s behavior and perceptions of the world.
Of course, most researchers don’t subscribe to only one perspective. For example, a researcher who works within the biological paradigm might also work within the cognitive paradigm. You could picture the different perspectives on psychology as spotlights and the whole discipline of psychology as a room. Each of the spotlights highlights a different part of the room and the more spotlights are turned on, the more you can see the entire room and the more knowledge you gain in turn.
What do Psychologists Actually do?
You already heard of the goals of Psychology as well as the perspectives on psychology, so hopefully you have gained a better understanding by now of what Psychology is all about. Now we dig a bit deeper and come to the real question: What do psychologist actually do? In what fields do they work? Well, when most people think of psychologists, they probably picture a therapist in their office, speaking in a soft voice to a client complaining about their life. And it’s true a lot of psychologists follow the path to become trained therapists or counsellors, but it’s not the only field they work in.
Psychology is roughly divided into basic subjects and application subjects. The basic subjects include general psychology, differential psychology, biological psychology, developmental psychology, and social psychology. General psychology concerns itself with psychological functions and behavior that all humans share. That includes consciousness, perception, attention, emotions, thinking and learning, just to name a few. Differential psychology is the opposite of general psychology. It focuses on the differences between people. Typical themes are differences in intelligence or personality, for example. Biological psychology is all about the biological and often neurological underpinnings of human behavior and experience. Developmental psychology studies human development, so how humans change and develop from the time they are infants until they are old and grey. Social psychology studies human behavior is social settings, so how other people and the society we live in, shape human behavior.
The application subjects encompass clinical psychology, organisational and economic psychology, and educational psychology. Clinical psychology is the one most people are probably most familiar with. It concerns itself with mental disorders and how best to treat them. Organisational and economic psychology is about optimising work environments or trying to understand people’s purchasing behavior for example. Educational psychology deals with educational processes that contribute to the development of educational components, as well as the conditions, activities, and measures that can influence these processes.
Other fields of application include traffic psychology, environmental psychology, political psychology and many, many, more. Another huge field is psychological research, of course, where psychologists lay the theoretical and experimental groundworks for all the psychological applications. This is where my personal passion lies. Overall, there really are no boundaries to where psychologists work. I will dedicate extra blog posts to the most important subfields I just mentioned.
Distinction from Related Sciences and Disciplines
Psychology as a science is cross-disciplinary: It’s natural science, social science, behavioral science, cognitive science, neuroscience and humanities in one. Because of that, psychology makes use of a vast variety of methods and schools of thought. It is the interface between immaterial and material concepts and terms and has therefore the potential to not be reductionist.
As a strictly empirical science, psychology uses theories, hypotheses, and models for answering research questions. Mathematics, especially descriptive and inductive statistics, as well as statistical methods are important tools for psychological science. Besides from scientific approaches, psychology also uses methods borrowed from empirical social sciences — quantitative as well as qualitative methods. No worries if you haven’t understood every word I just said. In time, I will explain all of them in more detail.
I also want to touch on the difference between psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry, because those are often misunderstood and sometimes used interchangeably. Psychotherapy is professional treatment of mental diseases with psychological methods. To be a psychotherapist, you need to have special training. A university diploma in psychology is not sufficient and in some countries, it is not even necessary to study psychology at a university to become a therapist. Now people often confuse psychotherapy with psychiatry, and there’s some overlap, but they require totally different kinds of formal training. Psychiatrists are medical doctors, so they need to study medicine and later specialise in psychiatry. Psychiatrists also diagnose and treat mental disorders, but they are also allowed to prescribe drugs, for example. Psychologists are under no circumstances allowed or able to do that.
WEIRD Bias
As you may have noticed in the short history overview at the beginning of the episode, psychology is mostly influenced by North-American and European white men. In this context, I would like to talk about the WEIRD bias, which I will also dedicate an independent episode to. WEIRD is an acronym for western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. Even though only about 12% of the world’s population live in WEIRD countries, 60 to 90% of psychological studies are performed there and are in turn conducted by people living in WEIRD countries. A lot psychological studies and experiments conducted in WEIRD countries produce totally different results in other parts of the world. It is even suggested that WEIRD countries are one of the least representative populations for generalising humans, and are indeed weird. This leads to the question whether we are in a position to conceive a general scientific theory of psychology that applies to all humans. And, in my opinion, an even more important question, is that even desirable?
Some parting words
This concludes the first entry for my All Things Psychology series. I realize that I covered a lot of ground here but I really do believe all of the information I presented here are important to get a basic understanding of what the field of psychology encompasses.
The next couples of posts will be a time travel to Ancient Civilizations where I will explore how their greatest thinkers approached the human mind and behavior. See you in the next one!
This post corresponds to Episode 1 of my Podcast All Things Psychology.
Listen to my podcast: https://linktr.ee/allthingspsychology
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