Q.How can you distinguish scientific psychology from the popular notions about the discipline of psychology?

Almost everyone develops an informal, personal theory of why people behave as they do, built up through everyday experience rather than systematic study -- for example, the common assumption that people are naturally lazy and need to be pushed, even forced, into performing well. Such common-sense explanations of behaviour may or may not turn out to be true once they are actually tested, and their basic structural weakness is that they are built on hindsight: the explanation for a behaviour is chosen only after that behaviour has already occurred, rather than being available beforehand as a genuine, checkable prediction. A classic illustration is what happens when a loved friend moves far away -- both the saying 'out of sight, out of mind' and its opposite, 'distance makes the heart grow fonder,' are available as explanations, and which one gets used depends entirely on which way things actually turn out afterwards, which means neither one was really doing any predictive work at all.

Scientific psychology sets itself a stricter standard: it looks for patterns of behaviour that can be predicted in advance and can be tested empirically, rather than explanations that are only ever offered after the fact. This standard has repeatedly overturned confident common-sense beliefs. Carol Dweck's 1975 study on children who gave up too easily after failure found, against common sense, that children given a long history of easy, guaranteed success actually gave up faster when they later hit a genuinely hard problem, compared to children who had been deliberately exposed to both success and failure and taught to attribute failure to insufficient effort rather than to being untalented. Other long-held popular beliefs -- that men are more intelligent than women, or that women cause more traffic accidents than men -- have both been shown by empirical research to be false. Likewise, the common assumption that performing in front of an audience automatically worsens performance turns out to be incomplete: with adequate practice, the presence of others can actually improve a person's performance.

What ultimately distinguishes a scientific psychologist from an astrologer, a tantrik, or a palm reader is exactly this discipline of testing: a psychologist systematically checks a proposition against real, gathered data before treating it as a genuine principle of human behaviour, instead of relying on hindsight, tradition, or intuitive conviction alone.