Question: How does psychology affect your average life ?

Laura Fisk answered on 10 Jun 2019:

My first thought on reading your questin was that the biggest way it seems to affect my life is being asked “So can you read my mind, then?” when people find out what my job is!
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My usual answer is, “No I can’t!” and I really don’t do any more mind reading than you do. That’s because all of us as human beings will to some extent be trying to work each other out. We’re all using ‘psychology’ (thinking about minds) pretty much all the time.
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But I think the fact that so many people ask me this question is interesting in its own right because it makes me think people are sometimes worried that I can do that. That makes me ask myself “Why might people be worried about whether I can read ther mind?”. I think, maybe they’re worried that ‘ll find out their innermost secrets (the things they want to keep private), or maybe they’re worried I’ll work out something about them that they won’t know about themselves. Maybe they think that I would use this information, if I had it, against them.
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And in fact, this is a good demonstration of how having trained as a psychologist affects my everyday life – it makes me ask myself questions about people and think about how they see the world! That’s what we do as scientists – we’re professionally curious!
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Adding to this, my formal education and training have given me fancy words and theories I can use to spot patterns in how people behave so that I can name it (“Ooh, that person is exhibiting confirmation bias…”) but the fancy words don’t mean I know more than the average person, just that I am practiced in describing it in a certain way. One practical aspect of my work – meeting lots of people all the time – means I have a lot of experience in engaging with lots of different kinds of people, which gives me a lot of practice time thinking about why people do what they do. The other bit it has trained me to do is suspend judgement: I know I see the world in a particular way because of the life I’ve lived; another person who has lived a different life will probably see things differently – my job is to find out how they think, and not to assume my way is the only or correct way. That’s probably often one of the biggest differences between the way psychologists interact with people and the way other people interact with people.
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So, I am using psychology every time I am interacting with or thinking about other people – but so are you.