Like many college underclassmen who had no idea what they wanted to study, I chose to major in psychology.
I thought it was a good default choice because the knowledge theoretically had wide application and could transfer to any other field. After all, psychology is the study of people, and I would be dealing with people anywhere I went, right? It also didn’t hurt that I heard the vast majority of the classes had open-book, multiple-choice midterms and finals.
So I checked the box next to “Bachelor of Science in Psychology” and went on with my day. It was something I devoted all of ten minutes of thought to, but in reality, I could have done much worse. Psychology has turned out to be incredibly applicable to my life, relationships, and career.
Psychology isn’t about reading minds or interpreting dreams, though that’s the impression some people may have. It’s more accurate to say that psychology is the study of why people do the things they do—beyond the obvious reasons you can see on the surface and often beyond people’s own understanding and consciousness.
This has obvious applications, such as seeing why some advertisements are more effective than others, why a child will rush to do something they are explicitly told not to do, and the plain effect on behavior that positive and negative associations can have.
But the biggest takeaway from my degree was that so many of our decisions are made completely subconsciously and without any awareness on our part. Our conscious thought follows our subconscious will, and it often isn’t until far after we act that we figure out what actually happened. We may think we are acting logically and reasonably in a situation—we may even use defense mechanisms to defend and justify our actions—but this is just our subconscious getting its way.
bert experiment, conducted in:
Next, the researchers paired the rat with a loud crashing noise, which frightened Albert and made him cry in most instances. After only a couple of exposures pairing the rat and the crashing noise, Albert was presented with the rat alone again. He reacted as if the crashing noise was also present; he had become afraid of the rat by itself. But if he could talk, he wouldn’t have been able to explain why. He just knew that anything involving the rat was bad.
He had started associating the rat with the loud noise that frightened him and wasn’t consciously aware of why he was suddenly recoiling and crying whenever he saw the rat by itself.
On the one hand, this tendency to be quickly conditioned to avoid negative situations is something that probably has evolutionary roots. If you didn’t quickly learn that furry, growling animals with large teeth were bad news, you likely didn’t stay alive too long. Regardless, Little Albert provided insight into how something seemingly so subtle and unrelated could affect people’s actions in very real ways.
