Psychology and the scientific method

Abstract

When asked our occupations and we reply that we are psychologists, the frequent response is ‘That’s interesting, I am a bit of a psychologist myself!’ This is a little chastening to our professional pride yet there is an element of truth in the response. George Kelly (1955) echoed the same sentiments when he wrote about his model man — man the scientist, who is continually construing and evaluating his environment to make sense of it. The aspirations of the scientist are in fact the aspirations of all men. In order to live in society, to cope with the mundane aspects of everyday living, each person in his own way must try to understand human experience and behaviour, interpreting feedback from the environment so that he can respond realistically and appropriately, predicting and controlling the course of events in which he is involved. So not only do psychologists, or even teachers, nurses and door-to-door salesmen use psychological knowledge in their daily lives but so does everyone else in their interpersonal relationships. This has caused many people to view psychology as ‘common sense messed around a bit’ or as an ‘abstruse way of stating the obvious’.