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

Question

What will be an ideal response

Answer 1

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).