THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYa developmental psychologist watching the way babies respond to smiles,
and a cognitive psychologist scanning participants’ brains while they
remember lists of words. Indeed, consider any aspect of how we behave
and you can be fairly sure that there is a psychologist somewhere in the
world investigating that topic.
One way to think about psychology research is on a continuum from
the big picture to the tiniest detail. You can identify psychologists by
their position on this spectrum. Social psychologists tend to study
people from the outside – crowds, friends, relationships. Cognitive
psychologists, by contrast, tend to lift up the bonnet and investigate how
memory and perception work. Some biological psychologists zoom in
even closer, studying individual brain cells. They also study aspects of
behaviour like stress and sleeping. It’s as if these different psycholo-
gists are working on different floors of the same office building. Like
company colleagues, they’re all working towards the same end – under-
standing human thought and behaviour – but day-to-day, they probably
won’t have that much to do with each other.
Another way to characterize psychologists is by their theoretical orien-
tation. Evolutionary psychologists, for example, seek to understand the
way people behave in the context of our evolutionary origins. Some
evolutionary psychology has been criticized for working backwards –
looking at a given behaviour and dreaming up an ad hoc explanation,
such as that language evolved because hand gestures wouldn’t be seen
across the long grass of the savannah. Quality evolutionary psychology,
however, provides novel, testable insights. Russell Jackson and Lawrence
Cormack’s “evolved navigation theory”, for example, accurately predicted
that people will perceive a vertical distance as greater when viewed from
above compared with below, based on the rationale that a drop is far
more likely to lead to harm.
Another important field of psychology that’s grounded in a particular
theoretical orientation is positive psychology. Founded by Martin
Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania, positive psychology is an
antidote to the traditional focus of psychology on people’s problems,
and seeks instead to study people’s strengths and how to nurture them.
One further important way to distinguish psychology researchers is
between those who measure and those who identify themes and ideas.
Formally, this is the difference between quantitative and qualitative
research. A quantitative researcher would go about investigating mood
by devising a scale and rating people according to how many items they
agreed with on that scale, thus resulting in a mood score. A qualitative