Understanding human behavior is critical to various parties. It helps in proper management of people as one can predict the outcome of various actions.
Psychology is primarily involved in understanding human behavior. Psychology has four main goals. These include describing, explaining, predicting, and influencing behavior. Examination of the four goals of psychology would enable one to have a clear understanding of psychology. However, there are parties who add a fifth goal – observing – as this is critical for better understanding a problem.
Performance of various activities, whether right or wrong, is the mere essence of human beings’ existence. Psychology observes and describes behavior differentiating the behaviors on various grounds. Psychology mainly classifies behavior as either healthy or unhealthy (Plotnik and Kouyoumdjian 4). Describing determines the relationship between different events (Pastorino and Doyle-Portillo 21).
Thus, one may notice that during certain periods – may be from January to March – a health club has more members than usual. This constitutes an observation of the event. The second role of psychology is predicting. If events have a certain frequency of occurrence, one may be able to predict the occurrence of the event future (Plotnik and Kouyoumdjian 4).
Thus, one may predict that the health club would be more crowded in January. Careful observation may make predict future effects correctly. However, this does not explain why the events occur at the specific time. This bring us to the third role of psychology, explaining.
Psychology attempts to explain reasons why certain events occur, using different, legitimate justification grounds. Thus, psychology may formulate various theories to explain the occurrence of the events (Carpenter and Huffman 5). Therefore, one may use different theories to explain the high health club attendance during winter. Some of the explanations may be either, the weather is not favorable for outdoor exercises making people opt to go to the health club, or is it because the human biology demands more exercise during winter. After knowing the causes of various behaviors or events, it is easy to influence the behaviors. Psychology attempts to change or control the behaviors to conform to societal expectations.
Thus, psychologists may help people overcome various unhealthy behaviors (Pastorino and Doyle-Portillo 21). Therefore, the health club may offer outdoor fitness facilities at the end of winter, to prevent a decline in the enrollment of customers due to the end of winter.
