What Is Psychology? 5 Keys To Discover This Science
Psychology is a discipline that is talked about a lot but it is not easy to understand in its entirety.
Some people believe that it is part of the health field, others assume that its main contribution is the “talking cure” or that psychologists know how to read the thoughts of others by analyzing what they say and how they move, and there are quite a few who They continue to confuse it with philosophy.
All of this is indicative of a fact: although psychology is a young science, the large number of currents and professional opportunities that come from it means that confusion has been generated about its reason for being.
What is psychology, exactly? The answer to this is simple and complicated at the same time, so, to understand it in a simple and organized way, we will see it based on 5 keys. Let’s start with the basics.
1. A simple definition of “Psychology”
We can start with a simple explanation of what psychology is. This definition would be the following: Psychology is the scientific discipline that studies and analyzes the behavior and mental processes of people.
This is a fairly superficial explanation of what is meant by psychology, but at least it serves as a starting point and also allows us to put aside one of the most frequent myths about this discipline. This myth is what psychology understands as one of the sections of the health sciences.
Certainly, the first psychologists were strongly linked to medicine and neurology, but from the beginning there was a desire to understand the human mind in its most universal aspects, not only in illness. Even Sigmund Freud, whose theories have become outdated, not only sought to understand psychopathology, but also the “psychic structures” and the mechanisms through which they functioned in any human being.
Thus, this science is concerned with studying mental processes in general, not only psychological disorders, although clinical and health psychology are its two most well-known and popular areas of intervention. This means that the idea that many people have of it focuses on only one of its facets and leaves out many of its components, such as social psychology, organizational psychology, etc.
As we have seen, the basic definition of psychology is surprisingly broad. However, this creates some problems. For example, there is no absolute consensus about what the object of study of this discipline is, that is, what it is trying to understand.
We have seen that, theoretically, psychologists study mental processes and behavior, but this simple distinction is already controversial.
For some, clarifying that mental processes and behavior are two separate things is necessary so as not to leave aside the objective of understanding feelings, beliefs and, in general, everything that happens, so to speak, “behind closed doors.” ”, inside our heads.
For others, especially the heirs of the behaviorist current, distinguishing between mental processes and behavior is unjustified either. Does what happens inside our head occur in parallel to what the rest of our body does? If we do not want to fall into dualism, we should start from the idea that our mental life is not born spontaneously somewhere in our “psyche”, as if it were some substance disconnected from the cells that make us up. According to this perspective, everything that we usually attribute to the mental is also a form of behavior: a type of response that appears when faced with a certain stimulus, produced in turn by a chain of causes and effects that is always connected to our environment and , therefore, to the non-mental.
3. Studying humans and non-humans
The definition mentions the relationship between psychology and the study of aspects of the human being, but this is not entirely the case. In practice, psychologists investigate and intervene focusing on our species, but many of them also work with ethologists, neuroscientists and biologists in general. studying all kinds of animals After all, many of them also have a nervous system, a mental life and the propensity to learn new behaviors.
In addition, it is also possible to study animals with an eye toward our species to better understand who we are and where we come from. Comparative psychology deals largely with this; For example, seeing the way certain groups of primates react to a mirror helps us know more about the nature of consciousness and self-concept.
4. Does psychology focus on individuals?
Before we have seen that psychology studies “people”. If this way of expressing seems ambiguous it is simply because it is; There are countless aspects on which this discipline can intervene, and some of them have to do with the social, while others do not.
It is currently widely assumed that our way of thinking, feeling and acting It has a lot to do with social interactions in which we have participated. We do not exist as individuals living on the margins of society; We are part of it, whether we want to or not, from the moment our mind is shaped by something created together: language.
However, when we focus on one of the facets of what makes us human, Some psychologists choose to focus their attention on the person understood as an individual, while others study the person as an entity that participates in a network of social interaction. For example, it is possible to study the intelligence or memory of individuals with certain characteristics, and it is also perfectly legitimate to analyze how the fact of participating in group work causes us to reason and construct proposals collectively.
5. Do psychologists do science?
Another of the hot points when it comes to understanding what psychology is is whether or not it belongs to the world of science. It is true that this discipline has a facet that is not part of science in the strict sense of the word, but more in any case applied sciences, since it uses scientifically generated knowledge to apply it and achieve certain effects. However, the controversy does not come from that side, but by the degree to which it is possible to predict the behavior especially the human one.
The power to predict what will happen and how to react when predictions fail is something that is given a lot of attention to determine what is science and what is not. Ultimately, seeing predictions about an element of nature confirmed is a sign that its functioning has been well understood and that, at least until a better theory appears, it is reasonable to trust the one that already exists. . It is in this aspect that the discussion about the scientificity of psychology focuses.
Predict behavior
Compared to chemistry or physics, psychology has many more problems establishing concrete and accurate forecasts, but this cannot be any other way: the nervous system of the human being, which is the main component of behavior and mental processes in our species, It is one of the most complex systems in nature, and it also changes constantly. This has two effects.
The first effect is that the number of variables that influence what we think, what we feel and what we do is overwhelming, practically infinite. The simple fact of having encountered an intimidating dog at the door of the psychology laboratory will influence what happens next. That is why psychology can choose to know statistical patterns and some of the most relevant variables when it comes to understanding psychological phenomena, but it does not aspire to know practically everything that comes into play, something to which chemists who work can aspire. They study molecules.
The second effect is that the behavior and mental They are the result of a historical process This means that we are always different, we are never identical to our “self” from the day before. What implications does this have when deciding whether psychology is science? Very simple: what a prediction is made about is never the same as what has been studied before and whose information has allowed the prediction to be established. The person or group of people we are trying to predict things about has already changed since the time we last analyzed them.
So, everything It depends on the definition of science that we use and its degree of breadth If we believe that scientists must predict with a very high degree of accuracy, psychology is left out, which does not mean that it is not useful, just as it happens with the profession of historians. But if we consider that science is that which allows us to establish predictions to a degree in which they are useful and prone to be called into question if it happens that they do not come true (something that does not happen in pseudosciences), then it remains inside.
