What is Psychology?

What psychology studies (mental processes, experience and behaviour), its schools from structuralism to constructivism, its growth in India, its branches and its links with other subjects.

Key ideas

• Psychology is the science of mental processes, experiences and behaviour of people in different contexts.
• Experiences are subjective, known only to the person having them; behaviour can be overt (seen by others) or covert (hidden, like silent planning).
• It is a natural science when it tests hypotheses deduced from theories, and a social science when it explains behaviour through people’s socio-cultural context.
• The mind is not the brain: it needs the brain but has no physical location, and it emerges as experiences are organised.
• Schools in order: structuralism, functionalism, Gestalt, behaviourism, psychoanalysis, humanistic, then cognitive psychology and constructivism.
• Piaget saw children actively building their own minds; Vygotsky saw the mind as a joint cultural construction made with adults.
• Durganand Sinha traced four phases in India, ending with indigenisation from the late 1970s.

Remember

Watch out

• Calling introspection objective: its reports could not be checked by others, which is why it was criticised.
• Mixing up structuralism (what the mind is made of) and functionalism (what the mind does).
• Saying a clinical psychologist prescribes medicines; only a psychiatrist, with a medical degree, can.

Worked example