Ch 1What is Psychology? — Class 11 Psychology, concept-first.

This chapter opens with a simple but genuinely hard question: why does someone choose to study psychology, and what do they expect to learn from it? When this question is put to a class, the answers r…

Psychology resists a single, tidy definition partly because it keeps evolving, and partly because the range of phenomena it studies is too wide to be captured in one sentence.

Long before it became an experimental science, psychology was described, going by its Greek roots (psyche, 'soul', and logos, 'study of'), as the study of the soul or mind.

Modern psychology grew out of philosophy, but what turned it into a science was its adoption of the scientific method, which places a premium on objectivity -- achievable only when there is agreement…

Psychology is more commonly classified as a social science because it studies human beings as social beings -- shaped by their socio-cultural surroundings even as they, in turn, help create those surr…

For a long stretch of its history, the term 'mind' was almost a taboo word in psychology, precisely because it could not be pinned down in concrete behavioural terms or given a physical location.

Because everyone, almost by habit, tries to explain why people around them behave the way they do, most of us end up building our own informal 'theory' of human behaviour -- for instance, the common b…

Modern psychology, shaped heavily by Western intellectual history, has a comparatively short formal life even though it grew out of a much older tradition of philosophical inquiry into questions of re…

The book's own Box 1.1 lays out a chronological timeline of landmark moments in the growth of modern psychology, weaving together the Western schools of thought described above, the parallel growth of…

The Indian philosophical tradition has, for a very long time, engaged seriously with mental processes and reflections on consciousness, the self, the relationship between mind and body, and specific m…

As psychology has grown, it has split into a wide range of specialised fields, each with its own preferred questions, theories, and methods, though the boundaries between them are often porous rather…

Because any discipline concerned with people inevitably touches on psychology, and because psychologists in turn draw on other fields to understand human behaviour, an interdisciplinary approach has b…

Psychology is not only a subject that satisfies curiosity about human nature -- it is also a discipline that offers real solutions to real problems, at every scale.