What Is Psychology?

Here is something unsettling. Research in neuroscience shows that your brain begins preparing to make a decision up to several seconds before you become consciously aware of deciding anything. In other words, the feeling that you are consciously choosing your actions may be, at least sometimes, a story your brain tells you after the fact. This is just one of hundreds of findings from psychology that challenge our everyday assumptions about how minds work. We think we remember events accurately — we do not. We think our judgments are rational — they are riddled with systematic biases. We think our personalities are stable — they shift with context in ways we rarely notice. Psychology is the scientific discipline that investigates these mysteries: what is actually happening inside the human mind, and why do people think, feel, and behave the way they do?