Hey there. Welcome to Introduction to Psychology. So glad that you're joining us. This video is just going to be a really basic overview of what psychology is as a field. So, psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behavior.
And that is a little bit broad, but it's broad on purpose because, as you'll learn very soon, psychology is made up of many different subfields, and those fields all focus on different aspects of human behavior and human cognition. So, we're going to keep that main definition kind of broad to encapsulate all of those different fields. Now, the actual word 'psychology' comes from ancient Greek, and I'm going to pronounce these in English because I don't speak ancient Greek very well, but it comes from the root words 'psyche', which means mind or soul, and 'logos', which means to study. So, it is the study of the soul. Isn't that beautiful?
Now, modern-day psychology relies on empirical evidence. So, kind of going back to this idea of psychology being a scientific field, we are always relying on empirical evidence, which is information gathered through scientific observation or experimentation. And sometimes when students, you know, enter their first introductory psychology class, they're a bit surprised by the focus on research and science that they find. Usually, when we think about psychology, we think about therapy and clinical practice, and those are definitely the more outward-facing aspects of the field of psychology that most people are familiar with. But under the surface, research is really what's kind of supporting all of that because we couldn't have very effective therapy if we didn't have research backing it up.
Right? So, in psychology, there are kind of two main domains. There's a research domain and a clinical practice domain, and they can complement each other and inform each other. But in your introductory psychology class, you're going to be learning actually quite a bit about this scientific research that we've done over the last 100 years. Now, modern psychology has four main goals.
So, we are trying to understand people's thoughts, motivations, and emotions. So, why do people think the way that they think, why do we behave the way that we behave, and why do we feel the way that we feel? We are also trying to understand how the brain works. And this aspect of psychology is becoming more and more advanced every day thanks to new technologies developing.
But just trying to understand the actual biology of how our brain and nervous system functions. We are also trying to identify and explain broad patterns of behavior. So, just kind of figuring out what those patterns are and then trying to figure out why we are seeing them. And then finally, we are trying to examine stability and change as people develop. So as we go from infancy throughout our lifespan, which aspects of us stay the same and remain stable, and which aspects change, and why does that happen, as well as stability and change across situations. So, if we took the same situation or the same person and put them into different contexts or different situations, which aspects of their behavior or personality might be stable and which aspects might change, and why are we seeing that?
So, that's kind of the main goal of psychology. Now just to kind of finish us off, throughout this course, you're going to see these little boxes called 'Think Like a Psychologist', and these boxes are just going to have little tips for those of you who are interested in psychology to kind of get you in the mindset of how psychologists think. So, my main tip for you right here, right now, in the first class of the entire course, is to get used to the phrase 'it depends' because 'it depends' is a very common and genuinely very important phrase in psychology. You're going to hear this all the time from your professors, from me. You know, you'll say, 'What would people do if this happened?'
And we'll say, 'Well, it depends.' Because again, this is a scientific field, and we don't want to be making inaccurate statements. Human beings are infinitely complex, and we can rarely make definitive statements. You'll mainly see definitive statements when we're thinking more about the physiology. So, when we're talking about the brain or physical perception, like how your eyes are working and things like that, you'll get a little more precise definitive statements, but aside from that, you're going to hear a lot of sort of wishy-washy stuff.
And no one's trying to be wishy-washy on purpose. That's just kind of the nature of psychology. You can kind of think of psychology honestly a bit like predicting the weather. We've all heard weathermen say things like, 'There's an 80% chance of rain in your area at 6 PM,' right?
But you've never heard a meteorologist say, 'There is a 100% chance of rain at your house at 6:25 PM, and you're going to get 0.3 inches.' Right? They would never say that. Same goes for psychology. We might say something like, 'In this situation, we often see people display this behavior, and we think it could be happening for one of three reasons.'
But you're never going to hear any psychologist worth their salt say, 'In this situation, people will always react in this exact way because of this.' If you hear that, like, run the other way because they're probably not a very good scientist. So, get used to that ambiguity. It is just a beautiful part of studying psychology.
Alright. So, that is our little intro, and I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye-bye.
