List and describe the four goals of psychology and the questions about behavior each answers

What will be an ideal response


Answer will include that the goals of psychology are to describe, understand, predict, and control behavior. Answering psychological questions often begins with a careful description of behavior. Description, or naming and classifying, is typically based on making a detailed record of scientific observations. However, descriptions fail to answer the important "why" questions.Therefore, psychology's second goal is to explain an event, or the goal of understanding, which usually means we can state the causes of a behavior. Psychology's third goal, prediction, is the ability to forecast behavior accurately. To a psychologist, psychology's fourth goal of control simply refers to the ability to alter the conditions that affect behavior, such as therapy being used to help a person overcome a phobia. In summary, psychology's goals are a natural outgrowth of our desire to understand behavior and, basically, involve asking the following questions: (1) What is the nature of this behavior? (description); (2) Why does it occur? (understanding and explanation); (3) Can we forecast when it will occur? (prediction); and (4) What conditions affect it? (control).

Psychology

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Thoughts such as, "She may not be beautiful, but she is very nice and smart," are examples of which of the following?

A. pragmatic thought B. cognitive-affective complexity C. relativistic thinking D. dualistic thinking

Psychology

Two kinds of relationships can be described by a correlation. They are

a. x and y variables. c. manipulation and measurement variables. b. positive and negative. d. standardized and similar conditions.

Psychology

What is the goal of the sociocultural model of prevention?

a. changes in social norms regarding drinking b. cessation of drinking c. limiting the availability of alcohol d. all of these

Psychology

When the front part of a sentence can be interpreted more than one way, but the end of the sentence clarifies which meaning is correct, we say that the sentence is an example of

a. parsing. b. temporary ambiguity. c. speech segmentation. d. lexical priming.

Psychology