Lesson 1 - Understanding Psychology Companion Notes

1. What is Psychology

2. • Define psychology as a social science.
• Describe the relationship between theory and research in
psychology.
In this lesson:

3. What is Psychology?
Psychology explores how you think, feel, and behave in
relation to you unique combination of personal and
environmental factors that we call context.
Although we’ve all had unique life experiences and are very
different from each other, there is still a lot we have in common
with each other.

4. Context produces subtle differences between us, while also
keeping some things the same.
• For e.g., there are instances where we smile because we are
genuinely happy, but there have also been sometimes to smile
when we want to pretend we’re happy.
Our differences come from the context of experiences.
Context in Psychology

5. How do Psychologists work?
• Psychologists try to find pattern that explain, describe, and
predict human behaviour.
• Psychologists conduct different kinds of investigations and tests
that give them evidence.
• This evidence proves (or disproves) answers to questions that
result in interconnected ideas that we call theories.
• Theories in psychology help describe, explain, predict and even
control human behaviour.

6. How do Psychologists work?
• Psychologists take an objective approach to answering
questions of human behaviour or determining strategies for
changing that behaviour.
• This means they’re based on facts and not personal opinions.
• This avoids bias in the claims made by psychologists.

7. Theory and Research
Evidence collected by psychologists either proves a theory right or
proves it wrong.
• Researchers begin with a possible answer.
• This makes way for an investigation to check if it is right or wrong.
• If enough supporting evidence is found, that builds the theory.
• If not, the investigation starts over with a new possible answer in
mind.

8. Theory and Research
Research takes different forms:
• Experiments
• Observations
• Case studies
• Focus groups
• Interviews
• Surveys

9. Lesson Summary:
1. Psychology is a social science.
2. Research conducted by psychologists helps answer
questions about how we think, feel, and act the way we do.
3. Research helps build theories that explain, predict, describe
and show how to control human behaviour and thought.