The Science of Psychology

Some may ask 'what is psychology?' 

The answer is simple. It is a scientific study of behavior and mental processes.

But why must be something scientific? Will it work without science? Or it is there just to make it sound fancier and more intelligent?

Everything has i own purposes and adding science to study behavior and mental processes are also important. But why? We need science in this to eliminate bias and to reduce error in measurement. Without science, to people may get different results on the same experiment in the same conditions due to the bias or error they made. Therefor, science is really important in psychology.

But how do we use science to study someone's behavior and mental process?

Is there anything that we should try to look for while using scientific methods?

Surely there are and they are known as psychology's goals which consists of 4 things which are:

1. Description
2. Explanation
3. Prediction
4. Control

To understand these 4 things better I will give a example of a behavior of a person which in this case is someone who is scared of dogs.

Firstly we will need to know what is happening,which is just observing that the subject's behavior and nothing everything about it. So through our observation we would see that the subject is afraid of dogs.

Secondly, we should explain why is it happening. In simpler word we should ask the question in this case 'why is the subject afraid of dogs?' From the question, we have to come out with a tentative explanation on the behavior that would explain the behavior then form a theory. So in the second goal, we should be able to explain why the subject is afraid of dogs and for this subject we just accept the subject is afraid of dogs because he was attacked by dogs when he was younger.

Next, we have to make predictions on when the behavior would happen again in the future. The prediction should be made by previous results. through our observation we had known that the subject will be afraid of dogs when he encounters dogs that are in defensive mode especially the dog from the same breed as the dog that attacked him.

Last but not least, is how we control that behavior. In this case we want to make the subject not afraid of the dog. So we could maybe let the subject to interact with a tame dog so that he would not be afraid at the same time make him more comfortable around dog. Thus making us to be able to control his behavior of being afraid of dogs.