Paste your essay in here…Psychology has many different schools of thoughts in which we can offer the world to help explain the mind and human behavior. These various different schools of thoughts include structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, Gestalt, and cognitive psychology. Through using the scientific method, we can explore central questions psychology offers within these different schools of thoughts. For example, the school of thought founded by John B. Watson known as behaviorism has central questions regarding what behaviors are, how these behaviors can be learned or extinguished, and what does the mind has to do with behavior? If you stand behind the structuralism school of thought, your central questions that interest you may include how thoughts and emotions can be broken down into basic elements, how the conscious mind perceives experiences, or explaining how or why people feel certain feelings in the most basic elements. Psychologists central questions they are interested in, and beliefs on why psychology is a valuable science typically varies depending on their school of thought.
It is important to note that no matter what your personal school of thought is, that you understand psychology is a science because it uses the scientific method to form hypotheses’, form experiments, collect data, and interpret results in journal articles. Psychology comes from a long line of sciences combined together to make this unique study. Derived from philosophical questions, physiology concepts on how the body works, physics methods, mechanics, and statistics, psychophysics such as sensation and perception, the scientific study of the mind and behavior known as psychology was born. Since all of these different concepts, methods, and theories are used in psychology; this makes it a very interdisciplinary science. Psychology was officially born when the scientific method was applied to these philosophical, physiological, and physics concepts (Schultz & Schultz, 2015). This interdisciplinary science was an important discovery, because without it we wouldn’t have knowledge on how to treat individuals that suffer from a mental illness, how to condition behaviors into individuals or animals or distinguish behaviors, how to predict behaviors, and many other things that psychology provides the world.
It is unfortunate to everyone that belongs to the psychological science discipline knows it is a common known belief that psychology is only therapy, and that people like Freud almost destroyed the value of psychology by not applying any type of science to his theories such as psychoanalysis. This misconception is important to address as a psychologist, because although a good deal of his data wasn’t collected in valid, scientific ways; other psychologists took his ideas regarding certain concepts in psychoanalysis such as unconscious process on thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, and defense mechanisms and applied the scientific method to their research (Schultz & Schultz, 2015). By other psychologists trying to protect the value of psychology and performing experiments and collecting real data on topics that were not previously validated by science is one way that we can put effort toward fighting against things that detract from psychology’s value, such as pseudoscience like some of Freud’s work.
This is just one important way of fighting for psychology’s value and the constant effort that is put into making society as a whole understand that psychology is a science. Another important factor that all psychologists could partake in that would help raise the value of psychology is making sure that we are up to date on past and current research studies, particularly in the school of thought that you tend to lean toward more, so that we can further educate the public on what psychological science really is and not the pseudoscience that many people see it as. Society tends to see psychology as an ‘easy’ science, if they refer to it as a science at all. This is not the case because if you were to administer a research article to someone that has not been properly trained in the department, they would struggle though certain sections in it such as the methods or results due to the use of the scientific method that is applied to our research in the discipline. Psychologists continuing to produce data that has been diligently collected and analyzed could cause the public to become more aware of what psychology is truly about.
So what does this all have to do with my personal philosophy of psychology? Over the last four years I have learned about different schools of thought in which psychologists can hold. These schools of thought include different theories and perspectives and all of these different schools of thought have worked together to evolve psychological science into what it is today. It is important to note these different schools of thoughts as mentioned above, because not every psychologist will view the department in exactly the same way because of these different theories and ideas. To me, behaviorism is the main school of thought that stands out and explains many of the central questions I believe psychology is about. Behaviorism allows us to conduct studies that allow us to determine how individuals acquire behaviors and how the environment has the ability to shape our actions in various different ways. I believe it is important to note that behaviorism focuses strictly on observable behaviors, and not so much on cognitions, emotions, moods, thoughts, etc. (Schultz & Schultz, 2015). Although I believe that behaviorism is one of the strongest schools of thoughts in explaining what I believe to be the central questions regarding psychology, I also think it is important to note that the other schools of thought also have their own strength and that the different ideas that combined can allow psychologists to be able to apply their ideas to more concepts.
I believe that throughout the last four years, my attitudes and beliefs have been drastically shaped and changed on what I see psychology as. For example, I always thought psychology was a science. However, before I thought it was a science just because it carried out experiments. I now understand that some experiments use the scientific method which makes these experiments and data much more reliable than other experiments that did not apply the scientific method (like many of Freud’s data collected on dream analysis, was not properly obtained) (Schultz & Schultz, 2015). I also now understand that psychology science has evolved and changed overtime all whilst incorporating other sciences into it at the same time such as physiology and biology, as mentioned before. These different attitudes and beliefs regarding the discipline have changed my thought process on how the mind and behavior interact, how behaviors can be acquired or diminished, and why people have certain behaviors under particular circumstances.