Fortunately for you, you are taking an introductory psychology course, and by the time you finish it, you will have some good answers about how you can sift through the onslaught of claims competing for your attention, and decide what to ignore and what's important. To get a clear picture of this field, you need to know about its methods, its findings, and its ways of interpreting information. But first, let's look more closely at what psychology is, and equally importantly, what it is not.

In recent decades, the public's appetite for psychological and medical information has created a huge market for the kind of outlandish advice and products we just described to you: pseudoscience and quackery covered by a veneer of scientific-sounding language. Pseudoscience promises easy fixes to life's problems and challenges, such as resolving your unhappiness as an adult by “reliving” the supposed trauma of your birth, or becoming more creative on the job by “reprogramming” your brain. It often plays on the appeal of technology. All sorts of gizmos have been marketed with the promise that they will get both halves of your brain working at their peak: the Graham Potentializer, the Tranquilite, the Floatarium, the Transcutaneous Electro-Neural Stimulator, the Brain Supercharger, and the Whole Brain Wave Form Synchro-Energizer. (We are not making these up.)

The psychology you are about to study—real psychology—bears little relation to the popular psychology (“pop psych”) and its pseudoscientific relatives (jokingly called “psychobabble”) found on the Internet, on television, and in thousands of self-help books. Psychology can be defined generally as the discipline concerned with behavior and mental processes and how they are affected by an organism's physical state, mental state, and external environment. Unlike pop psychology, scientific psychology is based on research and empirical evidence, which is gathered by careful observation, experimentation, and measurement. It is therefore more complex, more informative, and far more helpful in its explanations than is popular psychology. Learn more about the many ways psychology impacts our daily lives in the video Asking the Tough Questions 1.

Scientific psychology also addresses a far broader range of issues than does popular psychology. When people think of psychology, they usually think of mental and emotional disorders, personal problems, and psychotherapy. But psychologists take as their subject the entire spectrum of brave and cowardly, intelligent and foolish, beautiful and brutish things that people do. They want to know how ordinary human beings (and other animals as well) learn, remember, solve problems, perceive, feel, and get along or fail to get along with others. They are therefore as likely to study commonplace experiences—rearing children, gossiping, remembering a shopping list, daydreaming, making love, and making a living—as exceptional ones.

What Do You Know About Psychology?