What Is Psychology: Behavioral Psychology Studies

What It Means To Say Behavioral Psychology Studies

Behavior Psychology Studies

We now come to the word behavior in the definition of psychology. Behavior includes anything a person or animal does that can be observed in some way. Behavior, unlike mind or thoughts or feelings, can be observed, recorded, and studied. No one ever saw or heard a mind, bu we can see and hear behavior. We can see and measure what a person does and hear and record what a person says (this is vocal behavior). From what is dome and said, psychologists can and do make inferences about the feelings, attitudes, thoughts, and other mental processes which may be behind the behavior. In this way, internal mental events can be studied as they manifest themselves through what people do their behavior. Thus, it is through behavior that we can actually study and come to understand internal mental processes that would otherwise be hidden from us. When we define psychology as "the science of behavior," we are not excluding mind; we are saying that what a person does his or her behavior is the avenue through which internal mental events can be studied.

Definition Of Psychology

A Definition Of Psychology

Strange as it may seem, defining psychology is no easy matter because of both the wide scope the wide scope of its concerns and the philosophical differences among its practitioners. But if you ask a psychologist to define the word, the chances are good that you will be told something like: Psychology is “the science of human and animal behavior; it includes the application of this science to human problems.”

The fist part of this definition calls psychology a science. What is Psychology? The second part of the definition is about the application of the psychological principles to life’s problems. Can psychology help solve life’s problems? You may also wonder about the word behavior in the definition. Why behavior rather than mind or thoughts or feelings? Another question which may occur to you is whether psychology is the only science of human and animal behavior. Are there others? Suppose we look at each of these question, beginning, first, with the one about science.

Psychology As A Science

A science is a body of systematized knowledge that is gathered by carefully observing and measuring events. Psychologists do experiments and make observations which others can repeat; they obtain data, often in the form of quantitative measurements, which others can verify. This scientific approach is very different from forming opinions on the basis of individual experience or arguing from premises that no one can test. Thus experiments and observations are at the core of scientific psychology.

As a science, psychology is a systematic. Data from experiments and observations are essential, but for them to make some sense in helping us understand events, they must be organized in some way. Scientific theories are important tools for the organization of observed facts. To some people, the word theory simply means someone’s unsupported and unfounded notion of how things ought to be done or a set of abstract principles that do not work in practical situations. However, theory has quite a different meaning in science. Scientific theories are general principles which summarize many observations and predict what can be expected to happen in new situations. As summarize and predictors of events, scientific theories should not be thought of as “right” or “wrong” but merely as more or less useful in helping summarize what has been observed and in making predictions about what is to be expected when new observations or experiments are done. As new data are obtained, theories are subject to modification, or old theories may eventually be scrapped in favor of new ones which do a better job of summarizing and prediction than did the old theories. Many of the arguments scientists have with each other are over the modification and scrapping of theories as new data are gathered.

Another important part of most sciences psychology included is measurement, defined as the assignment of numbers to objects or events according to certain rules. We are all familiar with measurements of physical scales length, time, temperature, and the like. Measurement in psychology is often more difficult than it is in sciences such as physics and chemistry because many of the things psychologists study cannot be measured directly by physical scales. What are the yardsticks of happiness or friendship, for example? Even though many behaviors are difficult to measure, psychologists have devised many ingenious tests to assign numbers to them. Of course, not everything psychological is as difficult to measure as are happiness and friendship. We can often design our experiments and arrange our observations so that we can use physical measures of space and time to tell us about psychological events. For example, we can count the number of times a person behave one way in one situation and another way in another situation, or we can measure the time taken to make a response in one situation or another.

What Is Psychology

Behavioral Psychology Studies

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