Behavioural Science

Behavioural Science

Behavioural science constitutes another fancy name for psychology. Psychologists, like other social scientists, study human behaviour. For example, sociology focuses on societies, while political science discusses nations, states and international relations. Psychology concentrates on the study of the mind and social interactions.

Depending on the university, students majoring in psychology may do in both the Arts and Science faculties. However, to this day, criticism remains abundant of whether psychology warrants being sees as a science per se. Of course, unlike physics or mathematics, psychology theories are often based on conclusions from social experiments, and experimenters often diverge on the results obtained.

Most psychological literature stems from academic or peer-reviewed articles, usually structured in the following sections: literature reviews, introduction, methods, results and discussion. A good research paper will not only present arguments from previous similar experiments on the topic, but also inform the reader of contrary arguments. Also, a thorough discussion section includes limitations of the experiment conducted. To illustrate, a study conducted on members of certain group may not warrant generalizing the results to other populations. As such, results must have the following attributes: reliability, replicability, validity and generalizability. To achieve these, methods employed involve random sampling, when applicable.

Could a blindfolded crayfish pick stocks by throwing darts on Wall Street as well as some of the best brokers do? Photo: © Megan Jorgensen  (Elena)

Many branches exist in psychology, including social, personality, health and abnormal psychology, among others. Abnormal psychology is the branch most closely related to psychiatry, but the two greatly differ. Indeed, psychiatrists are doctors in the medical sense and are licensed to prescribe medication, while the same cannot be said about psychologists.

Reality being defined as a social construct, psychiatry and psychology have been criticized in the literature. Since psychology does not constitute a medical field, the importance, validity and reliability of psychological experiments continue to be debated. In fact, many people believe psychology is just literary fluff. Nonetheless, studying psychology may appeal to undergraduates precisely because of the cognitive stimulation stemming from seeing social events from dissimilar angles. For instance, while neuroscience (a likely core program course in psychology degrees) may be more serious, social psychology makes for lighter reading and appears a more interesting subject to explore, although such preferences depend on personal choice and taste.

Further, understanding neuroscience requires a solid foundation in biology, physics and chemistry, since lectures and textbooks cover fairly technical details. Therefore, admission to a psychology program in a respected university, more often than not requires the completion of introductory courses in both psychology and biology.