• Question: do you ever find yourself relating what you know about psychology to people around you

    Asked by anon-204920 to Sally, Lucy, Louise, James, David, Dan on 6 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: James Munro

      James Munro answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      Hey!

      I do this very rarely unless people ask me about it. Partly this is because psychology is not well understood. People still think it means sitting someone on a couch and asking them how they feel. Partly it is because everyone is a psychologist in their own way. Everyone works out what the world means to them, and I don’t want to influence them by linking their thoughts to the outcomes of studies or experiments.

      Where I do use psychology is to counter stigma or cruelty or misunderstandings. People are often bad towards each other for reasons like sexuality or nationality or gender. Or smaller issues like miscommunications or feelings of injustice or revenge. It is important to use my psychology knowledge and skills to try and calm things down and help everyone work together rather than against each other.

      A good friend of mine is a Norwegian clinical psychologist who works in war zones and refugee camps. She knows a lot more about using psychology to help people than I do!

      Lovely question, thank you.

    • Photo: Lucy Maddox

      Lucy Maddox answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      Sometimes yes. And it can be more or less helpful I think!

    • Photo: David Chadwick

      David Chadwick answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      Unfortunately I know too little about psychology to do this 🙁

    • Photo: Dan Taylor

      Dan Taylor answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      I am really bad for this! Watching TV shows or talking to friends about their relationship problems, I am so guilty for providing a psychological (usually evolutionary psychological) perspective to the issue at hand. I think its because for me, I do really believe what these theories are saying. I think its important that to at least some extent this is the case for everyone, if you don’t buy into the theories you’re researching, then you probably need to be looking at a different theory or perspective, of course that doesn’t mean you can use one perspective or theory to explain everything, but it makes sense you genuinely believe that these ideas you’re research can explain important part of human behaviour.

    • Photo: Sally Tilt

      Sally Tilt answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      I do!

      All the time!

      Once you have started thinking in a particular way I don’t think it is possible to put it back in a box – so yes I probably apply some of the models that I am aware of to my life and those around me – just to help me make sense of situations.

    • Photo: Louise Rodgers

      Louise Rodgers answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      I do this all the time – I don’t know how I would ‘un-ring the bell’ of the psychology I know about. In my day-to-day work I use psychological models and frameworks (like attachment theory https://www.simplypsychology.org/attachment.html for example) as a way to try and understand people and their world. I think its just part of the way I think now, I always have a kind of undercurrent of thoughts underneath my conscious thoughts, asking questions like, ‘they seem a bit angry … is it because… maybe… etc? I think I am just used to looking for clues about how people are feeling and trying to make sense of that. I can’t really switch it off and I don’t know if I’d want to!

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