Chapter 2: Psychological Research Overview
How does television content impact children’s behavior? (credit: modification of work by “antisocialtory”/Flickr)
Why do we study psychology at all? The simple answer: psychology allows us to predict how people will act through understanding how they think! As we will discuss throughout this chapter, studying the mind and predicting behavior is by no means a simple task. Imagine you are the professor of an introductory psychology course and you want to predict who will sit in the third seat of the front row on the last day of class. You might record who sits in that seat each class and rely on probability to predict who sits there, but there are a thousand and one other factors which might influence where any given student sits on any given day. How many can you think of?
Psychological research is all about understanding psychological processes to make educated predictions about the most unpredictable thing there is: human beings. For example, since ancient times, humans have been concerned about the effects of new technologies on our behaviors and thinking processes. The Greek philosopher Socrates, for example, worried that writing—a new technology at that time—would diminish people’s ability to remember because they could rely on written records rather than committing information to memory. In our world of quickly changing technologies, questions about the effects of media and its influence on behavior continue to emerge. Many of us find ourselves with a strong opinion on these issues, only to find the person next to us bristling with the opposite view.
How can we go about finding answers that are supported not by mere opinion, but by evidence that we can all agree on? The findings of psychological research can help us navigate issues like this.
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