• Question: When do you use psychology in every day life?

    Asked by modmax on 8 Jun 2023.
    • Photo: Steph Acaster

      Steph Acaster answered on 8 Jun 2023:

      All the time! Whenever you think about behaviour (yours or someone else’s) and notice patterns or think about the reasons behind a behaviour, you’re doing psychology.

      For me, learning about how dopamine (a neurotransmitter chemical in the brain) works to make certain experiences feel rewarding has been one thing that I use in everyday life. This can help you to make or break habits for example, if you know that multitasking can reduce the ‘value’ (in dopamine’s opinion) of doing each task separately, you can figure out how to make tasks you used to enjoy more enjoyable again. Or if you know that doing something on an uneven schedule and not knowing when the next ‘good’ will come (like scrolling videos on TikTok) will trap in your dopamine system, you could try to think up a way to avoid getting stuck in a scrolling session!

    • Photo: Ashleigh Johnstone

      Ashleigh Johnstone answered on 9 Jun 2023:

      This is a great question! I’m a huge fan of applied psychology – so thinking about how our knowledge of psychology can be used in the world around us. So our understanding of attention and multitasking from cognitive psychology can be really useful for government policy for things like using phones while driving!

    • Photo: Chloe Tasker

      Chloe Tasker answered on 9 Jun 2023:

      I think psychology is something you use all the time in everyday life, you just don’t know it until you study it! For example, I learnt about persuasion technique in my undergraduate degree, and now I know how to persuade people better!

    • Photo: Helen Dudfield

      Helen Dudfield answered on 9 Jun 2023: last edited 9 Jun 2023 1:48 pm

      It’s interesting in everyday life as a psychologist you are taught to observe and it does often become second nature.

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