2. The Demands of Practical Life
Even while psychology is early in its development, there is an urgent demand for guidance in meeting the demands of practical life. That is, there have been ongoing problems in the human condition that a better understanding of the human mind would be helpful in addressing, and the lack of any assistance has generated great interest in what little psychology presently has to offer.
(EN: And this is unfortunate, given some of the statements in the previous chapter, in that people are in a rush to apply it too soon, and seek to blame science for their own hastiness and overzealousness. That is, where science suggests the possibility of causality, people in desperation act on the assumption that there is a proven conclusion and are quick to blame science for their own folly in having prematurely and incorrectly imitated it.)
Consider education: the practice of teaching is closely connected to the science of mind - assessing a student's knowledge and finding a way to increase it depends heavily on psychological factors, and as such teachers seek to leverage the findings of psychology to improve their effectiveness in the classroom.
Medicine also turns to psychology, as much of a person's sense of health has to do with their perception. A person's reaction to their sensation of pain, and the conditions under which he will feel he has returned to health, are based on thoughts and feelings more than the genuine facts of reality. The patient wishes to "feel better" regardless of whether his condition is actually improved, and diagnosing many conditions requires the doctor to gather information by asking questions and interpreting his patient's description, which is vaguely related to sensations of pain or comfort.
Naturally, this can be taken to far, and there is already some element of solipsism in the notion that patients can think or feel themselves into wellness without any practical treatment - which is upheld by the apparent effects of placebo medications. And thus even in laboratory investigations or clinical trials, the physician must apply psychology to sift fact out of fiction.
A third example can be found in the vocation of the lawyer, who must also sort out personal accounts to discover the truth, and the imprecision of human perception and the imperfection of memory are further complicated by an intentional effort to deceive and mislead. Psychology offers some method for doing so - to detect the level of veracity in testimony requires understanding the capacities and motivations of the witness.
In these three professions, and others as well, there has long been a disjointed and imprecise method of discovering and applying the principles of psychology. To become a better teacher, doctor, or lawyer requires developing principles and employing practices that we now recognize as being derived from the discipline of psychology, though it was not previously named as such.
In that sense, the psychologist is working in a field of inquiry that focuses on certain aspects of practical life, isolating the factors that pertain to the human mind, and attempting to produce conclusions that are applicable across a broad range of endeavors. And in that way there is the potential within psychology to create greater effectiveness and efficiency in a broad range of occupations and professions: anything in which human beings are involved and their voluntary behavior must be understood or directed can benefit from the findings of psychology.
Economics is a very human field of inquiry. While we speak of materials, equipment, and capital resources these things are merely the props of economics, and human beings are the actors to employ them. Every market is made up of human beings, and the behavior of the market is an amalgam of the behavior of those who participate in trade, production, and consumption. It is plain to see that human thought is central to commercial activity - what remains to discover is how far psychology can be extended in this sphere of activity.