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Introducing Psychology Through Research
What is psychology?
We are all interested in human behaviour. We regularly speculate about our own and other people’s acts in our day-to-day lives. For instance, we wonder “why did she say that?” or “why do I forget to do things?” Also our sayings, such as ‘birds of a feather flock together’, reveal how we try to make sense of behaviour by creating rules of thumb. It is a rare person who does not try to work out how and why other people act and react the way they do, and what their thoughts and feelings are based on. Since we are all familiar with human behaviour, it can appear not to be a worthy subject to study. Indeed, if you mention to a friend or relative that you are reading about or studying psychology, you may well get the response “Isn’t it just common sense?” As psychology involves looking at everyday behaviour, it is often viewed as just common sense dressed up as science. But how far does common sense get us in understanding human behaviour? Consider the following statements:
“Our memory is more accurate when we are hypnotised”.
“Not everybody dreams every night”.
“The more bystanders there are at an emergency, the faster the victim will get help”.
“We can completely rely on an eyewitness’s memory of an event”.
“Brainstorming in groups is more effective than working alone”.
“We use only ten per cent of our brain”.
Are these ‘facts’ that you already know to be true through common sense? Actually, evidence from research indicates that these are not true. Clearly, common sense alone cannot take us very far in understanding what factors lay behind our behaviour. Also, returning to our proverbs, we can see that common sense is often contradictory (e.g., ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’ versus ‘many hands make light work’). If common sense is not enough to work out what is correct about out behaviour, then what can we use? This is where the discipline of psychology comes in; it obtains evidence by doing research in order to determine if our ideas about behaviour are actually correct. Before describing what psychology is in more detail, we will review some common ideas about what psychology involves. These ideas may or may not surprise you, but they will all provide more insight into what psychology is (and is not).
What psychology is not
Many people believe that psychology just involves hypnosis, therapy or only deals with mental illness. Some other common ideas are that psychologists can read your mind, brainwash you, analyse you or will do something devious to you. These are misunderstandings of what psychology is as a whole subject. We will look at why these are misunderstandings…
This extract is from Albon, A. (2007) Introducing Psychology Through Research. Open University Press: Maidenhead, UK. ISBN: 0-335-22134-3. The extract is reproduced with the kind permission of the Open University Press.
