What are psychology's four (practical) goals?

1. Describe behavior- find out what is happening. Easiest and often first goal to be achieved, but take care to
   • be objective-- report what you see rather than what you think you see. If your description contains adjectives or refers to motives, it is probably not objective.
   • get a fair sample of observations and subject them to statistical analysis. Otherwise, the pattern you think you see may be due to a coincidence, to your expecting to see such a pattern, or to ignoring observations that do not fit the pattern.
   • Observing people and asking them questions will allow you to describe behavior.
2. Predict behavior-- find out what will happen
   • Prediction is harder than description, and so mistakes will be made. As Neils Bohr joked, "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future."
   • Prediction is often accomplished by knowing what is happening (past behavior is often a good predictor of future behavior). Amazon, Netflix, and some dating apps try to predict your behavior based on what other people who are similar to you have done.
3. Explain (understand) behavior-- find out why it happens--find cause-effect rules.
• You could know what is happening and what will happen without knowing why it happens. For example, Netflix's computer may accurately predict what movies you will like but not know why you like them.
• Although knowing what is happening and knowing what will happen does not, by itself, let you know what is causing it to happen, such knowledge may give you hints about why it happens.
• So, psychologists can't use descriptive tools like surveys or observation to find cause-effect-rules. Instead, psychologists need to do a special type of study--called an experiment--to isolate the cause of an effect.
4. Control behavior --making it happen, apply the cause-effect rules. Two barriers to going from explaining to controlling
   1. You may not be able to control the cause of the behavior and thus not be able to control the behavior.
   2. It may be unethical to control other people's behavior.

Practice on distinguishing between psychology's goals.