Psychology as a Discipline

As we have discussed above, psychology studies behaviour, experience and mental processes. It seeks to understand and explain how the mind works and how different mental processes result in different behaviours.

When we observe others as lay or common persons, our own points of view or our ways of
understanding the world influence our interpretations of their behaviours and experiences. Psychologists try to minimise such biases in their explanations of behaviour and experience in various ways. Some do so by seeking to make their analysis scientific and objective. Others seek to explain behaviour from the point of view of the experiencing persons because they think that subjectivity is a necessary aspect of human experience.

In the Indian tradition, selfreflection and analysis of our conscious experiences, is held to be a major source of psychological understanding. Many western psychologists have also begun to emphasise the role of self-reflection and self-knowledge in understanding human behaviour and experience.

Regardless of the differences in the way psychologists go about the study of
behaviour, mental processes and experiences, they seek to understand and explain them in a systematic and verifiable manner.

Psychology, though it is a very old knowledge discipline, is a young science, if one
were to take the year of the founding of the first laboratory of psychology in 1879 in
Leipzig. However, what kind of science is psychology, still remains a matter of debate,particularly because of the new interfaces of it that have emerged in recent times.

Psychology is generally categorised as a social science. But it should not come to you as a surprise that, not only in other countries, but also in India, it is also a subject of study offered in the faculty of science, both at the undergraduate and post-graduate levels. Many students go on to earn a B.Sc. or M.Sc. degree in universities. In fact, two of the most sought after emerging disciplines which continuously borrow from psychology are Neuroscience and Computer Science.

Some of us would be aware of the fast developing brain imaging techniques like fMRI, EEG, etc. which make it possible to study brain processes in real time, i.e. when
they are actually taking place. Similarly, in IT areas, both human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence cannot possibly grow without psychological knowledge in cognitive processes.

Thus, psychology as a discipline today has two parallel streams. One which makes use of the method in physical and biological sciences and the other which makes use of the method of social and cultural sciences in studying various psychological and
social phenomena.

These streams sometimes converge only to drift apart and go their separate ways. In the first case, psychology considers itself as a discipline, which focuses largely on biological principles to explain human behaviour. It assumes that all behavioural phenomena have causes which can be discovered if we can collect data systematically under controlled conditions. Here the aim of the researcher is to know cause and effect relationship so that a prediction of the behavioural phenomenon can be made and behaviour can be controlled if need be.

On the other hand, psychology as a social science focuses on how behavioural phenomena can be explained in terms of the interaction that takes place between the person and the sociocultural context of which s/he is a part. Each behavioural phenomenon is assumed to have multiple causes.