Question: What is your specific favourite aspect of psychology and why?

Laura Jastrzab answered on 1 Jul 2020: last edited 1 Jul 2020 4:47 pm

I like psychology for many reasons but I’ll list my two favourite aspects here. I like psychology because (1) it is a very flexible and collaborative field and (2) also because studying human behaviour is rich and complex.

As humans, we like to think about and create things for ourselves – so there is very little out there that doesn’t touch on human behaviour to some degree.

Traditionally, when people think of psychologists, they often picture a therapist who talks to people about their problems. But in truth, the field of psychology includes quite a range of people from different training backgrounds, who study a wide variety of topics, using a wide variety of tools to carry out their research. For example, I am a psychologist but my work and research overlaps with social robotics and neuroscience. I use robots to understand more about how the human brain perceives humanness which can, in turn, also help inform how we design more engaging robots. I have other psychologist friends whose research overlaps with business, engineering, or education. Each of us collaborates and works with scientists from other fields to answer our research questions. It’s really fun!

Second, pursuing answers to questions like “Why do we (humans) behave a certain way?” are rarely (if ever) very straight forward. Some people might be put off by the never-ending questions and debate over our findings – but when I answer (or fail to answer) one question, without a doubt, those findings lead to even more questions I’d like to ask. So, it’s also the complexities of human behaviour and the brain that draw me specifically to study psychology.