Preconceptions of Psychology (Prompt #1)

     Before even choosing psychology as a field, I always thought of shrinks and the typical “how does that make you feel?” psychologists. Many people I have talked to also assume that. I usually get the response of “OH! You’re going to psychoanalyze your family? Figure out all their problems??” After taking an introductory class, I realized it was so much more than that. There are so many subsections of psychology that there’s not even a way for people to only specialize in just one area. Many psychologists will specialize in one area, but constantly have to pull from many other subfields. They all will overlap eventually. There’s personality, cognitive, behaviorism, psychoanalytic, evolutionary, research, and so many more areas that psychologists study. There are a ton of jobs that you can do with a psych degree that don’t include listening to people's personal problems. There’s research and clinical and a wide range of jobs to offer. I think many people in my field dislike the immediate response from most people that their jobs include “shrinking” people.

     As a reference, I looked at “The Personality Puzzle” Seventh Edition by David C. Funder. It is the textbook I am using in my current psych class, but it has a good introductory about preconceptions. He starts with saying that most people think of psychology as “what people are thinking and feeling under the surface” or “about sexuality, and dreams, and creativity, and aggression and consciousness and how people are different from one another”. He then says that that is wrong and psych is “about the precise manipulation of independent variables for the furtherance of compelling theoretical accounts of well-specified phenomena…” Making the science side of psychology a little more prevalent, which in all honesty I forgot about. I tend to focus on the social science side of psychology and not on the hard sciences. He also goes on to talk about the “psychological triad” which talks about how people feel, behave, and think. Just as I had thought and said prior, he states that when most people think of psychologists they think “first of the clinical practitioners who treat mental illness and try to help people with a wide range of personal problems”. The rest of the chapter goes on to talk about how there are multiple jobs and there are multiple lenses to look at psychology with. (Note: this textbook is a personality psychology book so it’s main focus is on personality and not just a basic introductory book.)

     This textbook was helpful in understanding overall psychology and personality psychology and the opportunities that lie within them. I had had many of the same preconceptions as was noted in the book and I already had understood the variability and range of options in the field of psychology. An introductory textbook may have been better to use, but this one had been extremely helpful nonetheless.

J.M.

Works Cited

Funder, David Charles. "The Study of the Person." The Personality Puzzle. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. 3-15. Print.