What Do Psychologists Do?

Psychologists are people who ask questions about behavior, but they ask those questions in a particular way. We will explore how they ask questions a little further on in this chapter. Here, I want to talk about the types of questions that psychologists ask.

One category of questions is motivational questions, or questions that begin with the word why. For example, we might ask why nearly a thousand people willingly complied with Jim Jones's request that they drink Kool Aid laced cyanide (see below). Or, we might ask why on the supposedly civilized continent of Europe, former neighbors in Croatia are now engaged in the brutal process of annihilating each other. Motivational questions comprise a large part of the questions in psychology.

The Heaven's Gate suicide is another such question (see below). How can a large number of seemingly well-educated people come to believe that the mother ship was coming to retrieve them in the wake of a comet?

Another category of questions is what I like to call ecological questions. These are questions that start with words like How?, Where?, and How Often? For example, we might ask how monarch butterflies navigate each fall from the continental United States to Mexico, never having been there before. Or, we might ask where we are most likely to become victims of violent crimes. Or, finally, we might ask how often college students engage in unprotected sexual activity.

The answers to these kinds of questions become the literature or the data of psychology. Part of being a psychologist is being knowledgeable of a good part of that literature and knowing how to find those parts of which one is not aware. Two of the goals of this course are to have you learn a small part of the literature, and to make you able to find the rest.

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