Each person in a certain sense is a psychologist. Every day we all study other people, their actions and emotions, building in our thoughts hypotheses and theories of human behavior. It is these hypotheses that are everyday psychology that is verified by a person’s personal experience. How is it different from scientific psychology?
First of all, everyday psychology is more specific. Everyday knowledge is tied to a specific situation or a specific person. It is far from always possible to apply the acquired knowledge to another person. That is why in everyday life we make miscalculations, make mistakes in people or incorrectly predict the outcome of the situation. Psychology as a science, on the contrary, tries to separate its knowledge from the situation, it seeks to generalize so that its theories can cover large expanses.
A person acquires knowledge about other people intuitively. It’s not often that we take a notebook with us, writing down each step of our interlocutor in order to understand it, and we don’t often set ourselves such a goal, we just communicate. A scientist, on the contrary, obtains his knowledge according to a certain plan. His methods are always thought out and as rational as possible.
But everyday knowledge about other people we get not only on our own, directly communicating with people. Tales, fables, sayings and proverbs that have accumulated human experience for centuries, mutating with it, also help us in this. Science uses textbooks and documentaries to transmit information.
As already mentioned, everyday knowledge is tested by personal experience. This means that it is difficult to understand the correctness of their conclusions without making a mistake. In scientific psychology, the method of testing knowledge is a scientific experiment. The material obtained during it is comprehended, verified, systematized and accumulated within the framework of a certain branch of psychology.
Scientific psychology would not have appeared and could not have existed without everyday psychology, but its knowledge is definitely not enough to understand the whole essence of human psychology.