But the difference between scientific psychology and people's personal opinions is that in scientific psychology, we try to find evidence that our ideas are right. For example, if we really think that people treat each other badly because they don't walk around naked, we can test this idea. You could see if people on nude beaches are nicer than people at the beach who are wearing clothes. You could make people angry, and see if they're more likely to behave aggressively toward others when they're wearing clothes and when they aren't. Even though this is a silly hypothesis, it can be tested, and the evidence can be examined.

While some psychology has not yet been tested, the structure of research psychology is that everything should be open to challenge by testing it. This is a lot different than a couple of guys sitting on barstools and talking about why people act the way they do!

Q. Is psychology debatable?

A. Speaking of a couple of guys sitting on barstools...Whether psychology is debatable depends on your meaning. Is psychology all nonsense? No. Psychologists have learned an awful lot about things, a few examples being the role of rewards on behavior (it's not as simple as you'd think: sometimes rewards can reduce a person's desire to do something), the ways that making decisions in groups are different from making decisions on your own; the illogical ways that people make choices; what makes a romantic couple likely to stay together or break up; the fact that attractive people have all sorts of advantages, but are not necessarily happier; the way information is stored in your memory. However, the process of proving the cause for a behavior leads to all kinds of debates. A lot of scientific progress occurs because women and men who believe passionately in their ideas fight over the evidence. In time, this fighting eliminates weak ideas and ideas that cannot be supported by evidence. The process can be very slow, but it's the ability to attack another's work that makes science self-correcting. Errors are eventually weeded out.

Q. Isn't psychology based on stereotypes?

A. I'd hope not. Look; the reason we use the scientific method to study human behavior is that we want to get at what really works, not what we simply believe to be true. While this may lead to some questions that look foolish (Do opposites attract?), the results can be surprising. (No, they don't.)

Q. Can you understand it without ever having taken psychology?

A. This is an interesting question, and it helps show the reputation psychology has. Would this question be asked about physics? Or chemistry? You might as well ask if somebody who's never played football before is good enough to quarterback in the Superbowl. Yet somehow, psychology is considered a light-weight field of study. Anything is possible, I suppose, but I wouldn't expect any deep insights into Cognitive Dissonance theory, for example.

Somehow psychology is seen as more accessible, easier for people to understand than physics, possibly because there's a lot less math in it. And since we all deal with people, we think we know something about them. To some degree, that's true: we are all psychologists of some sort, whether we've studied it or not. Everybody does a little psychology. We all try to predict other people's behavior: is this a good time to ask for a raise? If I ask that attractive person out to lunch, will he or she say yes? We call this intuitive, or naive psychology, and everybody does it. And because we know something about people, some of what you'll learn in psychology class will look like common sense. But lots of it isn't.

Q. Is psychology anything like sociology?

A. Which answer were you hoping for? Yes, it is. Both are social sciences, meaning they both use the scientific method to try to answer questions about social institutions: people, social structures, etc. They have some overlap in the theories they use, and discoveries in one may help explain the other (for example, the sociological concept of "relative deprivation" can be of use in understanding why people can feel poor, even when they have plenty of wealth). There is actually a subfield of both called social psychology, which is the intersection between sociology and psychology, studying how groups of people behave. Knowledge of one field may help in understanding the other, but in practice, they are kept rather distinct, like physics and chemistry.

Q. Do you think psychology will change the behavior of the students in the class?

A. Maybe a little, but I'm really hoping to change the way students think. Some of the goals of my psychology course is to teach people a different way of looking at the world, to understand how social scientists ask questions and seek answers. If I succeed, students will have a new set of tools for understanding how the world works, and will be able to ask better questions and seek the answers than they did before.

Q. Is psychology boring?

A. I don't think so, but I'm sure there are students who disagree with me!

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

See earlier "Ask Dr. Bob" pages:

2003

August 25
September 1
September 15
October 20
November 17

2004

January 26
February 16
March 21

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