Psychology is the scientific study of thought and behavior. This means asking why we do the things that we do and think the thoughts that we think. If you’ve ever wondered why you need to spend so much time sleeping, why visual illusions occur, or how to figure out whether or not that cute classmate has a crush on you, you’ve considered psychological questions. While current research may not be able to definitively answer the many questions we pose, it can certainly help us to investigate the plausibility of the explanations we generate.
You see, whether you study psychology formally or not, there are questions that you will undoubtedly confront throughout your life. We all wonder about the world we live in and in doing so, we ask the type of questions that psychology attempts to answer. We wonder about the causes of events and behaviors, why some people seem to dance on silver-lined clouds while others are left lamenting the rain, or how some otherwise-rational person can so fervently disagree with our own point of view. I mean, what is wrong with that guy?!
You shouldn’t think of psychology as a separate subject, neatly compartmentalized from all others. What I hope this book will show you is that psychology is life. The study of psychology will lead you from statistics to sociology, philosophy to pharmacology, epistemology to economics, mathematics to meditation, and biology to basket-weaving. Attempting to understand our own thoughts and behaviors inherently ties us to all of human endeavor. Never can one say that the field of psychology isn’t relevant to one’s personal life. No matter what you’re interested in, psychology can help you to understand it. And if you aren’t interested in anything at all, psychology will have something to say about that too.
While psychology as a field of academic study may be relatively new, our natural human desire to understand the world means that we have been asking psychological questions since the dawn of our existence.
This post is an excerpt from Master Introductory Psychology: Complete Edition
