Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. A knowledge of psychology can prepare you for almost any kind of public interaction in life: it can help you know how to communicate to large audiences, which is beneficial to areas like politics; it can help with individual interaction in places such as interviews or clinical settings, and it can even improve your personal life: if you know what can cause mental or emotional distress then you know how to prevent it. 

Psychology is a very, very diverse field that can be applied to medicine, law, technology, philosophy, almost any field of study you can imagine. A background in psychology can improve almost any career path you decide to take.

1. Psychology is a discipline which seeks to study the thoughts and actions of man (as well as the behavior of animals) in a scientific way. If one is to understand exactly what this means a clear definition ofscience is required. Science is a marvelous development in the history of human thought.

QUESTION #1.2: What makes psychology scientific? Psychology is a science because it follows the empirical method. The scientific status of any endeavor is determined by its method of investigation, not what it studies, or when the research was done, and certainly not by who did the investigation. All sciences use the empirical method. Empiricism emphasizes objective and precise measurement. Psychology and the other behavioral or social sciences (sociology, anthropology, economics, political science) are not as precise in their measurements as are biology, chemistry or physics, but to the extent that psychologists use empirical evidence, their findings may be referred to as scientific. It is this emphasis on the empirically observable that made it necessary for psychology to change its definition from the study of the mind (because the mind itself could not be directly observed) to the science of behavior. We can directly observe and carefully measure externals such as what a...