If being in psychology has taught me anything, it’s that human behavior is VERY complicated. However, I think many people believe that if you just use “common sense”, you can get a pretty good idea of why people act the way they do. Everyone is an ‘amateur psychologist’. Think about it. If somebody asks your opinion (assuming you didn’t know) about why the sky is blue, what Voltaire’s most important philosophical contributions were, or what the next few digits of  the number pi will be, you will probably say, “I don’t know!”.

However, if somebody asks you “why do you think people behave this way”, you will probably have some thoughts. Let’s say your teenage brother Tom is acting like a jerk. I bet many people you know will have thoughts on why:

• “He’s just tired and cranky. Teenagers need a lot of sleep.”
• “He’s growing up and sick of following the rules.”
• “Teenagers are always moody.”
• “He always got his way as a kid and now he’s spoiled.”
• “It’s because he hasn’t got a girlfriend.”
• “He’s just jealous that his older brother got into a good college and he wants attention.”
• “He’s depressed.”

There are a million ‘common sense’ ideas about human behaviour. The thing is, some, all, or none of them may be right. In the above example, any number of those factors could be making Tom act the way he is. Maybe it’s a combination of them. Maybe some of them are really important and some are less important. Maybe none of them are right at all.

The point is, we don’t know for sure.

Enter psychology, which has the very complicated job of untangling the mysteries of the human mind. It’s the job of psychological research to try and determine causality, that is, which things cause what.

Determining causality in human behaviour  is especially complicated, since many things can interact to cause one outcome, and/or one thing can cause many outcomes. Humans are a mess of processes that interact with each other to shape our behaviour, including biological processes (like our genes, hormones, brain structures), and environmental processes (like how our parents treat us when we are little or what culture we grew up in). Add all of these things into the equation, and it’s not a simple “first this, then this”.

What psychology is trying to do is come up with scientifically validated ways to conceptualize what we see. We’re trying to get closer and closer to accurately capturing what is REALLY going on in a situation. There are lots of ways to look at situations that may SEEM right, but they’re not the best way of looking at things.

For example, let’s say you’re driving down the road and see 3 white cars pass you by. All of these cars are going really really fast. So you conclude, “white cars go really fast”.

Even after you see some white cars driving slowly on the road, you still might believe that white cars go really fast. When you see fast ones, you say “Look! More fast white cars! I knew it!”. And man, maybe at least 50% of the time you can predict if a car is fast if it’s white! That’s pretty good.

There is just one problem. The colour of the car tells you absolutely nothing about it’s speed. Any relationship there is just a coincidence, and it doesn’t help you in decision making at all. It seems to make some sense, but it’s ultimately not much more helpful than if you tried to make conclusions about how fast cars would go based on the weather that day.

This idea can be applied to any of the “common sense” psychological theories that we have. Let’s go back to your cranky brother and work with the theory that he’s cranky because “he doesn’t have a girlfriend”. Well, he DOESN’T have a girlfriend, so that seems to be supported, right? But you don’t really know if he had a girlfriend if that would make any difference.

Or let’s say the idea that “teenagers are just moody”. You may look around and notice that LOTS of teenagers are moody. But: some probably aren’t. AND, maybe it’s not that teenagers are moody- maybe it’s that lots of people of any age are moody! Or maybe it’s that teenage boys are moody! SO MANY POSSIBILITIES!

Long story short, our common sense views of “why people do what they do” often don’t reflect the complexity of human behavior. And while some of these theories seem to be helpful,  they might not be helpful at all. In fact, in some cases they may even be harmful, especially when we start to make decisions based on the wrong information.

In order to find out what’s going on with human behavior, scientific studies can be really beneficial. By using scientific methods to try and break things down, we can hopefully separate our “common sense” ideas of what’s going on from what is really happening.

It’s a difficult job, but a fascinating one!

Kate