Psychology for Dummies Read Free Page A

psychology is that it covers a topic that we all have experience with — people. It’s pretty hard to say the same thing about chemistry and astronomy. Of course, we all encounter chemicals every day, but I can’t remember the last time I asked, “How do they get that mouthwash to taste like mint?”
    One of the best places to catch armchair psychologists in action is the local coffeehouse. The tables are filled with people sitting around and talking about the whys and the wherefores of other people’s behavior. “And then I said. . . .” “You should have told him. . . .” It’s like being in a big group therapy session sometimes. We’re all hard at work figuring people out.
     

     
    Psychologists sometimes call this armchair psychologizing
folk psychology
— a framework of principles used by ordinary people to understand, explain, and predict their own and other people’s behavior and mental states. In practice, we use a variety of psychological notions or concepts to explain individuals’ mental states, personalities, or circumstances. Two concepts that a lot of us use for this purpose are
beliefs
and
desires.
We all believe that people have beliefs and that they act on those beliefs. Why do people do what they do? Because of their beliefs.
    When we practice folk psychology, we assume that people do what they do because of their thoughts and mental processes — their beliefs and desires. Folk psychology isn’t the only tool that armchair psychologists use. It’s not unusual for people to explain other’s behavior in terms of luck, curses, blessings, karma, fate, destiny, or any other number of non-psychological terms. I don’t want to make these explanations sound like a bad thing. It’s pretty hard to explain why someone wins the lottery from a psychological perspective. Explaining why someone continues to buy tickets even when they keep losing? Now that can be explained using psychology.

One Among the Sciences
    A number of scholarly fields attempt to use their own perspectives to answer the same core questions that psychology attempts to answer. In one way or another, physics, biology, chemistry, history, economics, political science, sociology, medicine, and anthropology all concern themselves with people. The psychological perspective is just one voice among this chorus of disciplines that strives for validity based on the acceptance of the scientific method as the most valid and useful approach to understanding reality.
    Psychology exists among and interacts with other disciplines. Just as each of us lives in a community, psychology is part of a community of knowledge, and it provides a unique contribution to that community. It’s a tool for understanding people. Sometimes, its theories and research are the right tools, and sometimes, they’re not. Not everything is reducible to a psychological understanding, but we need tools for understanding the chaos of human behavior and mental processes.
    Over the years, hundreds of thousands of psychologists have come up with a basic set of
metatheories
or “grand theories” to guide our work. These theories are used to cast a framework on the whirling and buzzing world of human behavior and mental processes in order to begin to understand it. One comment I get from students from time to time is, “What makes you think that psychology has all the answers?” My answer, “Psychologists are just trying to provide a piece of the puzzle, not all the answers.”

Framing with Metatheories
    Each of the following grand theories provides an overarching framework within which most psychological research is conducted. (There are other perspectives that represent hybridized approaches, such as neuropsychology and cognitive science. But for now I’m just sticking with the basics.) Each of these metatheories has a different point of emphasis when approaching the core psychological questions of why, how, and what. A lot of research and theory is based on one or