What is Psychology?

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Psychology Class XI (Introduction to Psychology), Chapter 1.

Two proverbs, both "true"

A friend you love moves to another city. What happens to your bond? "Out of sight, out of mind," says one proverb. "Distance makes the heart grow fonder," says the other. They say opposite things, yet each sounds wise, and which one you quote depends entirely on what happened after your friend left.

That is the problem with common sense: it explains behaviour after the event and predicts nothing. Psychology sets out to do the harder thing, which is to find patterns that can be tested before the event. This chapter shows what psychology studies, how it grew, and where it is used.

What psychology studies

The word comes from two Greek words, psyche (soul) and logos (science or study of a subject). Early psychology was a study of the soul or mind, but it has moved far from that. The formal definition is the one to learn word for word:

Psychology is a science which studies mental processes, experiences and behaviour in different contexts. It uses the methods of biological and social sciences to collect data systematically.

A discipline is defined by what it studies and how it studies, and the "how" matters more. Each of the three key terms in the definition has a precise meaning.

Overt and covert behaviour. Overt behaviour can be seen or sensed by an observer, such as blinking or running. Covert behaviour is internal. A chess player in a tight spot feels her hand muscles twitch as she tries out a move in her head, and her heart pounding in an examination is covert too. Every behaviour, overt or covert, is triggered by a stimulus (S) and produces a response (R), and both can be internal or external. You see a tiger and run, or you merely think there is a tiger and decide to flee.

Mind is not the same as brain. Brain activity can be recorded by imaging techniques while you solve a problem, and mental processes depend on it. But the two overlap without being identical. The brain has a physical structure and a location. The mind does not. It emerges as your interactions and experiences get organised into a system. Mental activity continues in sleep too: you dream, and you notice a knock on the door.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: mind cannot exist without brain, but it is a separate entity, shown by three cases. Patients whose occipital lobes (responsible for vision) were surgically removed still responded correctly to the location and shape of visual cues. An athlete who lost an arm continued to feel a "phantom arm" that reached for a coffee cup. A young man with brain injury insisted that his parents had been replaced by duplicate impostors. In each, the brain was damaged but the mind seemed intact. In reality: most neuroscientists today explain phantom sensations through the brain itself. The brain keeps a map of the body, and that map goes on firing after a limb is lost. So scholars still debate whether mind is separate from brain or simply what the brain does. Use the textbook's position in the exam and know that the debate is open.

Natural science or social science?

Psychology has two parallel streams today, and they sometimes converge and sometimes drift apart. The stream you follow decides what counts as a good explanation.

The hypothetico-deductive model in one line: a theory (such as the Big Bang in physics) → a hypothesis deduced from it → empirical data → theory confirmed or revised. Most psychological research still follows this route, and it has produced theories of learning, memory, attention, perception, motivation and emotion.

The Ranjita and Shabnam story. Two classmates in one village live very different lives. When floods hit, Shabnam's house is destroyed and Ranjita's family takes her in. You can see regularity here, because communities often become helpful in a crisis. But not every villager helped equally, and in similar crises some communities turn to looting. A single principle cannot predict every case, so psychology must study behaviour in its social and cultural context. That is why it is generally classed as a social science, even though in India it is also taught in science faculties.

Common sense versus science

Everyone acts like a psychologist. We explain why a colleague behaves as he does, and we hold "theories" such as "workers are lazy, so push them." Such popular theories may or may not hold when tested.

Dweck's study (1975). Some children give up too easily when faced with a difficult problem. Common sense says to give them easy problems first so their confidence grows. Carol Dweck trained two groups for 25 days in solving maths problems. Group one got only easy problems. Group two got a mix of easy and difficult ones, and whenever they failed they were told that they had not tried hard enough and were persuaded to keep trying. In the new problems that followed, the "easy only" group gave up much faster on failure than the mixed group.

Pause and predict: a coaching teacher decides to give a weak student only easy questions "to build confidence." Based on Dweck's study, is this likely to work?

Check your answer: probably not. Easy-only practice never teaches a student what to do after failing, so the first real failure makes her quit. The mixed group learned to link failure to lack of effort, which is something she can change.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: the finding is that a mix of easy and difficult problems with effort-based explanations of failure raises persistence. In reality: Dweck went on to build this idea into her later work on how beliefs about ability affect effort, popularly called the growth mindset. Why it matters: the lasting lesson is that how a child explains failure shapes what she does next.

Other common beliefs fail the test too. Empirical studies show that "men are more intelligent than women" and "women cause more accidents than men" are untrue, and well practised people can actually perform better before an audience. Psychologists differ from astrologers and palm readers because they test statements against data.

How the discipline grew: schools of thought

As a field of thought, psychology is very old. As a science it is young, dated from 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt set up the first experimental laboratory at Leipzig, Germany. The history is a chain of reactions. Each school argued that the one before it had left something out.

See Gestalt for yourself. A string of festival lights blinking in turn looks like a spot of light running along the string. A film is thousands of still pictures flashing past your retina, but you see smooth motion. In both cases your experience is more than the input, and that "more" is the Gestalt.

Constructivism: who builds the mind? The cognitive view holds that people actively build their minds by exploring the physical and social world. Piaget and Vygotsky agree on this, and differ on what does the building.

Two views. For the exam: psychology's history is a clean sequence, with each school reacting to the one before: structuralism, functionalism, Gestalt, behaviourism, psychoanalysis, humanistic, cognitive. Another reading: historians of psychology note that the neat sequence is a teaching simplification. The schools grew in different countries at the same time, and their ideas overlapped. The 1879 date is also conventional, marking the first laboratory built for systematic experiments, not the first time anyone thought about the mind. Learn the sequence for marks, and remember that real history was messier.

Pause and predict: which school would call a report such as "I felt a rising dread before the exam" unscientific, and why?

Check your answer: Watson's behaviourism. For Watson the mind is not observable, and introspection is subjective because another observer cannot check it. Science must stay with what is observable and measurable. (Structuralism itself used introspection, which is the very thing behaviourism attacked.)

Landmarks to remember

Psychology in India

The Indian philosophical tradition is rich in thought about mind, consciousness, self and mind-body relations. Yet modern psychology in India grew mainly from Western psychology.

Dr. N. N. Sengupta, trained in the USA in Wundt's experimental tradition, shaped early experimental psychology at Calcutta. Mysore and Patna were other early centres. Two UGC centres of excellence are at Utkal University, Bhubaneswar and the University of Allahabad.

Durganand Sinha's four phases. His 1986 book Psychology in a Third World Country: The Indian Experience traces how Indian psychology matured.

Branches of psychology

Newer branches include aviation, space, military, forensic, rural, engineering, managerial, community and political psychology, and the psychology of women.

Clinical psychologist, counselling psychologist and psychiatrist. These three are confused again and again.

Psychology and other disciplines

Any discipline that deals with people uses psychology, and psychology borrows in return.

In everyday life, psychology helps with study habits, memory and exam stress, and with understanding yourself and others. A balanced view of yourself matters. Some people reject all feedback that contradicts their self image (defensive behaviour), while others habitually run themselves down, and neither state allows growth.

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Next: Methods of Enquiry in Psychology shows how the "systematic data" in the definition is actually collected.
• Same book: Behaviourism returns in Learning with Pavlov and Skinner, Gestalt in Sensory, Attentional and Perceptual Processes, and Piaget and Vygotsky in Human Development.
• Class XII link: Self and Personality builds on the psychoanalytic and humanistic views, and Therapeutic Approaches shows the work of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists in practice.