Q. What makes psychology necessary to me as an automotive technician? Why do we study psychology? Does psychology have anything to do with my major?

A. Another common question. The reason why is that ever since people went to college, starting back in the Italian Renaissance, it was felt that students needed to learn about a variety of subjects to receive a well-rounded education. In those days, gentlemen (ladies need not apply) were expected to know all of the liberal arts. Back then, there was less to learn! Today, we accept that nobody will know all of the liberal arts, but we expect undergraduate students to be exposed to a variety of courses, not just the ones in their particular discipline. There are few programs at Morrisville that specifically require psychology, but they do require a social science course as part of the degree. Psychology just happens to be one of the most popular social science courses.

For my part, I think you can find some use for psychology in just about any career. You're likely to be dealing with other humans in some capacity in your future, and it wouldn't hurt you to understand something about the reasons why people act they way they do. There's also the idea that a good social science course should teach you more than just that discipline: you should learn some ability to weigh and judge evidence to draw a conclusion; you should learn something about assessing the strength of an argument; you should learn something about the scientific method; you should learn something about how social scientists discover truths about people, society, and life.

Sounds pretty grand, doesn't it? You don't have to become a psychological researcher to gain something from this course.

Q. What does "Socs" mean to you?

A. Well, there's the whole pronounciation controversy. Should it be pronounced as "sosh," like the beginning of "social," or should it be pronounced "socks," like it looks? I'm a "socks" man, myself. Oh, you probably mean what is a social science? Socs is the Morrisville State prefix for courses offered by the department of social sciences. This is a collection of separate disciplines that seek to understand people and their organizations. We have anthropology, economics, history, psychology, and sociology represented in our department. Anthropology looks at human cultures; economics looks at how we use our resources; history looks at how things develop over time; psychology looks at how humans act; and sociology studies how large groups are organized and work. These disciplines often blend into one another, but they share a common background in that they attempt to explain the often difficult and confusing things that people do or did. We're not a big enough school to need separate departments for each discipline, so we lump them all into one department.

Q. How long have you been teaching this course?

A. Who knew such a simple question could be so complicated to answer?. The easiest answer is "I taught my first Introduction to Psychology course in January, 1993." That means I've been teaching for ten years. Or, if you prefer, I've been at Morrisville since January, 2001, which makes this my third anniversary. If you want more details, see my cv (curriculum vitae, fancy words for my resume) here. That will tell you more than you want to know about my teaching background and my credentials.

Q. Why do people have reflexes?

A. Because without them we'd be dead? A reflex is an automatic response to a stimulus, meaning your body responds without your needing to think about it. Some of these are necessary to keep ourselves alive, such as swallowing when there's food in our throat, hurling when we swallow tobacco juice, and taking a breath when the carbon dioxide levels in our blood are too high. The reflexes we are more familiar with, such as jumping away from a loud noise or from getting burnt, are actually controlled directly by your spinal cord without involving the brain. Your brain is too slow! If you had to recognize what a burn was, decide how to respond to it, and then initiate the action to move away from it, you'd be pretty badly hurt by the time you started to move. So we let our spinal cord do the work for us, and leave the brain to do more important things, like wonder what's for lunch.

Q. Can you tell how your students are going to act just by the way they sit when you walk into the room?

A. This is a common myth about psychology. People are nervous that psychologists know everything about a person, and we can read the subtle, secret signals that you don't even know about. Relax; there's absolutely nothing like that going on. Part of the reason why people believe this can be blamed on the popularization of Sigmund Freud's theories. He argued that unconscious hostility and sexual feelings are revealed by symbolic behaviors, and these can be interpreted by a trained observer. Sadly for Freud, there has been precious little evidence for most of his ideas, and his theories have largely been discredited inside scientific psychology. Now, having said that, some people can make some pretty shrewd guesses about what you're thinking or what you're like by watching your behavior. But this is experience and intuition, not stuff we learn in psychology class. Paul Ekman, one of the world's most prominent experts on detecting lying by watching people, says only that some people are good at this, and others aren't. It seems to be a skill that's hard to teach. So go ahead and slouch: I can't read your mind.

Submit your own question: email me at dushayr@morrisville.edu

See earlier "Ask Dr. Bob" pages:

August 25
September 1
September 15
October 20
November 17

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