What psychology is
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Abstract
A science of mind We spend an enormous number of our waking hours thinking and talking about our thoughts, emotions, and experiences. For example, we wonder: Why did the waiter give me that unusual smile? Did my co-worker see me stealing those office supplies? How can I deflect my unwanted admirer's attention – or attract the attention of someone else? In trying to answer such questions, and in interpreting one another's behavior more generally, we make use of a vast body of lore about how people perceive, reason, desire, feel, and so on. So we say such things as: the waiter is smiling obsequiously because he hopes I will give him a larger tip; my co-worker does know, but he won't tell anyone, because he's afraid I’ll reveal his gambling problem; and so on. Formulating such explanations is part of what enables us to survive in a shared social environment. This everyday understanding of our minds, and those of others, is referred to as “folk psychology.” The term is usually taken as picking out our ability to attribute psychological states and to use those attributions for a variety of practical ends, including prediction, explanation, manipulation, and deception. It encompasses our ability to verbally produce accounts couched in the everyday psychological vocabulary with which most of us are conversant: the language of beliefs, desires, intentions, fears, hopes, and so on. Such accounts are the stuff of which novels and gossip are made. Although our best evidence for what people think is often what they say, much of our capacity to read the thoughts of others may also be nonverbal, involving the ability to tell moods and intentions immediately by various bodily cues – an ability we may not be conscious that we have.