Introduction:
What is
psychology?
Take a seat in a bustling bar or café and you’ll doubtless hear energetic
discussions about who did what to whom and why. That’s because
we’re all psychologists at heart. Rare is the person who doesn’t wish
to understand him or herself better. Who isn’t interested in improving
their relationships with the people they live and work with? Visit a
school and see an ink-stained teacher struggling to engage a class of
recalcitrant children. Listen as a nurse urges a heart-attack survivor
to stop smoking. Gatecrash a tense board meeting where managers
are persuading overworked staff to go the extra mile. Marvel as
hoards head herd-like for the beach on a scorching summer’s day.
Psychology, literally “the study of the mind”, is about all this and much
more. It’s the science of why we think and behave the way we do,
alone and in our relationships, and its findings are relevant to every
aspect of our lives.
Psychology – science or
common sense?
The difference between professional psychologists and the rest of us
is that they know what they don’t know. They are the ultimate sceptics.
From the café to the boardroom, you’re likely to find people using intui-
tion – their gut instincts – in their attempts to understand or influence
other people. Psychologists, by contrast, strive to be objective about the
subjective. They measure, test, observe, report, verify and repeat. They
propose dispassionate hypotheses for why people behave the way they do,
and then perform experiments, gathering evidence to test whether those
hypotheses stand up to scrutiny.