What is true psychology?
Are you interested in psychology? Have you ever looked
into personality analysis? Barbara Cheng reveals how
to recognize pseudo-psychology.
Image via study.com
Image via study.com
Image via zodiactruth.com
Recently a new constellation, Ophiuchus, has captured much attention. The
increasing amount of comments about the personality analysis produced shows
the invested interest in predicting personality types and the future. However,
should we consider this as part of psychology?
Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behavior
(www.simplypsychology.org/whatispsychology.html) and was established over
100 years ago. In this sense, you may think it is still relatively new. But with the
rise of several famous psychologists like Sigmund Freud, B. K. Skinner, John
Watson and so on, diversified schools of thought soon emerged. However, there
are so many research areas that psychologists in different areas cannot even
understand clearly. This means that psychology focuses a lot on science in an
attempt to explain and predict the causes of behavior through systematic and
objective procedures. Psychology can be rigorous in that it always encounters
challenges from pseudo-psychology. It tends to offer an ambiguous prediction,
and the verification approach is actually more acceptable to the public than the
falsification approach. However, even if this kind of prediction is “proved” to be
true, it is of little value.
Pseudo-psychology refers to a psychological practice that is false or unfounded
(study.com/academy/lesson/pseudo-psychology-definition-examples.html).
Some familiar terms you may have heard before are, new age, folk psychology,
astrology, psychic reading, mind reading and control and are often disputed as
unreliable.
ISSUE 03: FEBRUARY 2016
Image via cambridge.org
It's great that people can
find more ways to learn about
themselves and take an interest
in psychology. However, I
would warn people to always
be wary of consuming poorly
researched theories.
Barbara Cheng
is studying
psychology at
HKIEd and likes
extreme sports,
backpacking,,
reading, and
writing lyrics.
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