Everyday and scientific psychology

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Everyday experience, everyday psychology is the basis for scientific psychology. Scientific psychology relies on worldly psychological experience, derives its tasks from it, and at the last stage is tested by worldly experience.

The main difference between everyday and scientific psychology lies in the quality and nature of knowledge. Everyday knowledge and experience is usually more concrete, intuitive and often of a low cultural level: based on spontaneous observations, random reflections, often negative and irresponsible, highly susceptible to fashion, moods, fears and rumors, largely irrational. Scientific psychological knowledge is thought out, generalized, rational, substantiated by professional observation and organized experiment.

Concreteness vs. Generalization

Everyday psychological knowledge is concrete; they are timed to specific situations, specific people, specific tasks.

Waiters and taxi drivers, as a rule, are good worldly psychologists, but, as a rule, only within the framework of their profession.

Children are professors of psychology, he is alone with his mother, another with his father, and a third with his grandmother: in each case, the child knows well how to behave in order to achieve the desired goal. But outside of their families, children tend to be naive and helpless. Their knowledge doesn’t spread that far.

Scientific psychology, like any science, strives for generalizations. It sets such tasks for itself and moves towards these tasks, albeit gradually.

Intuitiveness — thoughtfulness

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Everyday psychological knowledge is intuitive. As a rule, they are acquired through practical trials and adjustments, and this path does not require rational thinking.

For example, children gain their experience through the daily and even hourly tests they put adults through. Experience is the richest, everyone has it, but few can express it verbally.

Scientific psychological knowledge is thought out, rational, fully conscious.

Cultural Level

The cultural level of scientific knowledge and scientific concepts is usually higher. Everyday psychological knowledge is based on spontaneous observations, random reflections, often negative and irresponsible, highly subject to fashion, moods, fears and rumors, largely irrational and often no different from superstition.

Where did you get the bases from?

Lovers of the tabloids rarely wonder what certain judgments are based on. For example,

• The ad uses the “25th frame effect”↑
• Controlling your emotions is bad
• «All you need is love!» etc —

Such judgments are presented confidently and ostensibly convincingly. The brightness and novelty of the judgment, the proximity to the usual points of view often turn out to be more important circumstances than the facts confirming or refuting the judgments.

Is scientific knowledge subject to fashion, rumors, fears and moods? In the field of exact sciences — to a small extent, in the field of psychology — unfortunately, yes. The unofficial ban on the word «formation», which has developed in psychology in recent decades, hardly has any objective, scientific grounds. Nevertheless, in the field of psychology, scientific judgments are more justified than worldly concepts, and with the development of psychological culture, they gradually approach the high standards of science more and more.

Common beliefs in the psychological community that do not have a serious evidence base:

• A family curse can be removed by sincerely asking for forgiveness from the deceased.
• Without maternal love, a full-fledged personality cannot be formed.
• The loss of a loved one is a severe trauma.
• The consequences of childhood psychotrauma make themselves felt throughout the rest of life↑
• Behavioral therapy is less effective than depth therapy↑.

Negativity and irresponsibility — certainty, responsibility

Considering that the cultural level of the population is low and is more at the level of a human child, the main features of the beliefs of everyday psychology are negativism and irresponsibility. Typical samples of negative and irresponsible beliefs of worldly psychology:

• How you spend the New Year, so the year will turn out!
• Monday is a hard day.
• Morning is never good.
• Everyone thinks only of themselves↑.
• Training doesn’t help anyone.
• All diseases are from nerves.

Psychologists working in a science-oriented tradition tend to be more specific and responsible in their formulations.

Verification methods

Everyday knowledge is verified by personal experience, scientifically substantiated by professional observation and organized experiment.

The essence of the experimental method is that the researcher does not wait for a confluence of circumstances, as a result of which a phenomenon of interest arises, but causes this phenomenon himself, creating the appropriate conditions. Then he purposefully varies these conditions in order to reveal the patterns that this phenomenon obeys.

Scientific knowledge is consciously systematized and accumulated.

Scientific psychology has at its disposal extensive, varied and sometimes unique factual material, inaccessible in its entirety to any bearer of worldly psychology. This material is accumulated and comprehended, including in special branches of psychological science, such as developmental psychology, educational psychology, patho- and neuropsychology, labor and engineering psychology, social psychology, zoopsychology, etc. In these areas, dealing with various stages and levels of mental development of animals and humans, with defects and diseases of the psyche, with unusual working conditions — conditions of stress, information overload or, conversely, monotony and information hunger, etc. — the psychologist not only expands the range of his research tasks, but and encounters new unexpected phenomena. General psychology develops through the development of special branches of psychology, and this is precisely the main Method (method with a capital M) of general psychology. Everyday psychology lacks such a method.

The position of a scientific psychologist in relation to worldly psychology

What should be the position of a scientific psychologist in relation to the carriers of worldly psychology? The development of science is reminiscent of moving through a complex labyrinth with many dead-end passages. To choose the right path, one must have, as is often said, good intuition, and it arises only through close contact with life. It is necessary to respond sensitively to the demands coming from life, and strive to ensure that scientific developments enter into life, improve the psychological culture of people, and form a more healthy and positive worldly psychology. A scientific psychologist must be at the same time a good worldly psychologist, or, to be more precise, a practical psychologist.