Human psychology: 25 Facts, laws of human behavior, learn psychology, studies and research.

HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology is a source of fascination for many people. By learning about the basics of behavior and the human mind, people are able to gain a greater understanding of themselves and others. 

Psychologists also play a vital role in health care by caring for individuals experiencing mental health issues, performing psychotherapy, investigating treatment options, and teaching patients how to manage their symptoms effectively.

For some people, an interest in psychology is fueled by a desire to pursue a career in the field. Others may simply want to learn more out of curiosity or because they are thinking about consulting a psychologist for help with a health concern. No matter what the reason, building a better understanding of topics such as emotion, motivation, cognition, love, communication, and research methods will serve you well.

Psychology may seem like a vast and daunting topic at first, but understanding a few basic facts can make it easier to get started. Once you have a strong understanding of the basics, you will be better prepared to explore different ways that psychology may help improve your everyday life, health, and well-being.

psychology - The study of the mind and Behavior

Psychology can be defined as the study of mental processes and behavior. The term comes from the Greek words psyche, meaning "breath, spirit, soul," and logia, meaning "study of."

Psychology has not always existed as it has today. In fact, it is considered a relatively young discipline, although as one eminent psychologist explained, it has a short past but a long history.

Psychology has quickly grown to play a tremendous role in the world today. Psychologists are employed in hospitals, mental health clinics, schools, colleges and universities, government agencies, private businesses, and private practices. They perform a wide variety of tasks and roles ranging from treating mental illness to performing research to influencing public health policy.

Psychology emerged from biology and philosophy and is closely linked to other disciplines including sociology, medicine, linguistics, and anthropology.

15 mind blowing facts of Human psychology 

Learning something new about yourself is always interesting and entertaining. And understanding the human psychology behind the way we behave, treat others, and express ourselves can be even more appealing.

Today, we here at fossicks have compiled a list of the most surprising human psychology facts that can help you better understand yourself and others.

#1. The way a person treats restaurant staff reveals a lot about their character.

#2. People who have a strong sense of guilt are better at understanding other people's thoughts and feelings.

#3. Men are not funnier than women, they just make more jokes, not caring whether other people like their humor or not.

#4. Shy people talk little about themselves, but they do this in a way that makes other people feel that they know them very well.

#5. Women have twice as many pain receptors on their bodies than men, but they have a much higher pain tolerance.

#6. Listening to high-frequency music makes you feel calm, relaxed, and happy.

#7. If you can't stop your stream of thoughts at night, get up and write them down. This will set your mind at ease so you can sleep.

#8. Good morning and good night text messages activate the part of the brain responsible for happiness.

#9. Doing things that scare you will make you happier.

#10. The average amount of time a woman can keep a secret is 47 hours and 15 minutes.

#11. People who try to keep everyone happy often end up feeling the loneliest.

#12. The happier we are, the less sleep we require.

#13. When you hold the hand of a loved one, you feel pain less keenly and worry less.

#14. Intelligent people tend to have less friends than the average person. The smarter the person is, the more selective they become.

#15. Marrying your best friend eliminates the risk of divorce by over 70%, and this marriage is more likely to last a lifetime.

#16. Women who have mostly male friends stay in a good mood more often.

#17. People who speak two languages may unconsciously shift their personalities when they switch from one language to another.

#18. Being alone for a long time is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

#19. Travel boosts brain health and also decreases a person's risk of heart attack and depression.

#20. People look more attractive when they speak about the things they are really interested in.

#21. When two persons talk to each other and one of them turns their feet slightly away or repeatedly moves one foot in an outward direction, this is a strong sign of disagreement, and they want to leave

#22. Women generally prefer men with deep husky voices because they seem more confident and not aggressive.

#23. The people who give the best advice are usually the ones with the most problems.

#24. The smarter the person is, the faster he thinks, and the sloppier his handwriting is.

#25. Our emotions don't affect the way we communicate. In fact, the very opposite is true: the way we communicate has an influence on our mood.

Laws of Human Behavior

The other day, I was talking to a guy with a physics background. He said that he is very fond of the field of psychology, but expressed concern about the fact that, unlike physics, it is “a soft science” that does not have any universal laws. Well, we didn’t have time to get into it but, in fact, while I actually used to agree with this sentiment, I don’t anymore. 

My appreciation for the evolutionary perspective in psychology has totally changed this in my mind, as I have dug more deeply into the field over the past two decades.

The basic proposition of evolution is, actually, a universal law and logical truism. Renowned evolutionary biologist George Williams (1966) put it this way: Evolution is nothing more than a “statistical bias in the rate of perpetuation of alternatives.” Evolutionary psychologists take this reasoning and apply it to our understanding of behavior. As such, evolutionary psychologists always think about the processes that we study as following some basic natural laws.

Here, I demarcate two of the most basic ideas in the field, framed as scientific laws with derivative principles that follow.

2 Basic laws of human behavior 

From the evolutionary perspective, there are, in fact, many laws that underlie human behavior. Two of the most basic are related to “behavioral adaptations” and “evolutionary mismatch”

#1. Behavioral adaptations: Are Darwinian adaptations, and like any Darwinian adaptations, they ultimately serve the function of increasing the probability of survival and/or reproduction.

A behavioral adaptation is any psychological feature that was naturally selected and came to characterize a species because it helped increase the survival and/or reproduction of individuals in that species who displayed that adaptation under ancestral conditions (see Geher, 2014). While it takes a great deal of effort to scientifically document the existence of a behavioral adaptation, with the right data-collection processes, and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, it can be done (see Schmitt & Pilcher, 2004).

Consider the fact that people across the globe find babies’ faces irresistibly cute (see Kringelbach et al., 2016). Well, this is a behavioral adaptation. Ancestral humans who found these faces cute were more likely to pay positive attention to their babies. And this would have led to increases in the probability of those babies successfully surviving and, ultimately, reproducing—passing along this trait (of responding positively to baby faces) into the future.

The broader point is that behavioral adaptations follow a lawful path that follows Darwinian logic. If a behavioral process or pattern can be documented to truly be a Darwinian adaptation, then we know several things about that process or adaptation with law-like confidence, We know that it is the result of an evolutionary process, such as natural selection. We know that it, on average, had the effect of increasing the probability of the survival and/or reproduction of our ancestors. And we know that it exists in some capacity across various human populations (because this is how adaptations run). We know its function, and we can use this knowledge about the adaptation to make all kinds of scientific predictions related to it.

So we can think of the basic idea of a behavioral adaptation as a law of psychology.

And this law, then, leads to various derivative principles that follow. In fact, we can think of the various behavioral adaptations that have been documented by scholars in this field as the derivative principles that follow from this basic law.

#2. Evolutionary mismatch: which exists when the modern environment of an organism is mismatched from the ancestral environment of that organism, will lead to demonstrable outcomes.

A basic premise of Darwin’s take on evolution is that organisms were shaped by natural selection to have features (both physical and behavioral) that fit with the details of a particular environment. Evolutionary mismatch (Giphart & Van Vugt, 2018) exists when the organism, in some objective kind of way, finds itself in an environment that is mismatched from the ancestral environments that surrounded the evolution of that organism. A simple example would be found if you tried to plant a palm tree in upstate New York. That plant would not survive the winter. That is because the adaptations of that plant are matched to more temperate conditions; its ancestors evolved under temperate environmental conditions.

The idea of evolutionary mismatch is a derivative of the basic law of natural selection. And it acts as a scientific law, based on logical assertions.