What Do Psychologists Do?
Modified: 2023-08-14 (3:04 PM CDST)
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Psychologists are people who ask questions about behavior, but they
ask those questions in a particular way.
- We will explore how they ask
questions a little further on in this chapter and in chapter 2.
- Here, I want to talk
about the types of questions that psychologists ask.
- One category of questions is motivational questions, or questions
that begin with the word "why."
- Another category of questions is what I like to call ecological
questions.
- These are questions that start with words like How?,
Where?, and How Often?
- For example, we might ask how monarch
butterflies navigate each fall from the continental United States to
Mexico, never having been there before.
- Or, we might ask where we are
most likely to become victims of violent crimes.
- Or, finally, we
might ask how often college students engage in unprotected sexual
activity.
- The answers to these kinds of questions become the literature or
the data of psychology.
- Part of being a psychologist is being
knowledgeable of a good part of that literature and knowing how to
find those parts of which one is not aware.
- Two of the goals of this
course are to have you learn a small part of the psychological literature, and to
make you able to find the rest.
Back to Chapter 1 Lectures