What Is Psychology?

Let me first answer this question with the classic definition: psychology is a science that studies the mind and behaviour. I think this is both a very broad and a very narrow definition. Psychology is a far wider field than you might imagine. Although the first thing we think of when we hear psychology is psychotherapy and pathology, that is the subject of clinical psychology, just one branch of psychology. The other branches are related to and feed one another, but they differ mainly in what they study: Developmental Psychology, Social Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Experimental Psychology, Forensic Psychology, Industrial Psychology, Neuropsychology and Neuroscience, Evolutionary Psychology, Behavioural Genetics, Biopsychology, Environmental Psychology and Personality Psychology are some of psychology's branches. So from now on, think twice before telling someone who studies psychology: "Graduate and treat us too, sweetie, I'll be your first patient, I promise!" Because if, for example, they're going to work in cognitive psychology, their research topics are things like attention, memory, perception, problem solving, language and thought processes, and asking them questions like "How do we see?", "Can I trust my memory?" or "Why do we get déjà vu?" will be more useful for both of you. And if they want to become a clinical psychologist, after a four-year bachelor's in psychology they need at least a two-year master's in clinical psychology, and to keep going in the field with training and supervision. I continue my article with the rightful pride of having buried a joke for good.

Where were we? Psychology is just this broad and complex a field. I don't know if you noticed, but the definition doesn't say "the human mind and behaviour", because psychology studies and experiments on animals as well as humans. Remember Pavlov's dog: it was the first experiment that taught us classical conditioning. The main aim of using animals is, of course, still to understand people. Among the animals used most often are rodents, especially mice and rats, and pigeons. Monkeys and other primates are also used in research. Of course, experimenting on animals is a sensitive matter, and experiments that don't pass the ethics committee can't be carried out (thankfully). The ethics committee is the board you present your idea to for approval before any experiment you want to do in psychology, and if it isn't found ethically appropriate, you can't run your experiment. In psychology's early years, because these ethical questions weren't settled (and even today there are debates, especially about animal experiments), many experiments that might seem horrifying to us now were carried out on both humans and animals. Harlow's experiment, for example, in which he separated baby monkeys from their mothers to see how it affected their later lives. Most of these monkeys suffered severe psychological disturbances and died young. Another example is the Little Albert experiment, in which Watson frightened the baby he used as a subject, causing him to develop many phobias. Zimbardo's famous prison experiment, in which he divided people into prisoners and guards to observe their behaviour, but things got out of hand, people came under severe stress and those playing guards even began to use violence against those playing prisoners, could not pass an ethics committee or be carried out today either. Let's not move on without noting that these experiments made important contributions to psychology; credit where it's due. But I think this also raises an important question: it matters to be able to see that things done to improve something, in the name of "science", can ironically turn into the very thing that does harm once they get out of control. As with everything in life, I think it's more useful to look at scientific work with a critical eye. This reminds me of the film Oppenheimer. Should the matter of developing, of being able to develop, of having created such a terrible instrument of destruction as the atomic bomb really have come before the danger of destruction the weapon could cause? Is the only one responsible the person who gave the order to drop the bomb, or does the one who put such a weapon of mass destruction into the hands of those capable of this cruelty also share the blame? With these and similar questions, and the associations they bring to mind, I'll leave the topic here for now. If you'd like to read more about science and psychology, you can also read my article "Science, People and Psychology: Where Does Truth Begin?"

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