What Do Psychologists Do?

[Ready for Fall 2026]

Modified: 2026-07-27 3:14 PM CDST

• 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.