What is Psychology?

This is the first chapter of NCERT's Class 11 Psychology textbook and the first psychology chapter on this site. It does four things: it defines psychology (what it studies and how), separates it from common sense, tells the story of how the discipline grew — from Wundt's laboratory in 1879 to the schools that followed, and in India from Calcutta University in 1915–16 — and maps its branches, its neighbours and its uses in daily life. It has three activities, Box 1.1 (a timeline of landmarks), Figure 1.1 (psychology and other disciplines), eight review questions and two project ideas.

• Leads into Chapter 2 (methods of enquiry — experiment, observation, case study, the ‘how’ this chapter keeps stressing), Chapter 4 (perception, where Gestalt returns), Chapter 5 (learning — Pavlov, Skinner), Chapter 6 (memory), Chapter 7 (thinking and decision-making) and Chapter 8 (motivation and emotion — Maslow).
• Pairs with live chapters: Class 11 sociology Sociology and Society (its ‘Psychology’ row: social psychology as the bridge between the two subjects, and the same distrust of common sense) and Doing Sociology: Research Methods (objectivity, the insider's view — a good preview of Chapter 2); Class 12 sociology Introducing Indian Society (unlearning common sense).
• UPSC: psychology has no GS paper of its own. Its main use is GS4 Ethics, whose syllabus names attitude, social influence and persuasion, emotional intelligence, aptitude and values; UPSC has set emotional-intelligence questions in 2013, 2017, 2019, 2020 and 2021 and attitude questions in 2014, 2020 and 2021. This chapter supplies the vocabulary those topics rest on — behaviour, cognition, experience, motivation — plus the decision-making Nobels (Simon, Kahneman) that GS4 and Essay topics on judgement draw on. GS1 society answers (suicide, violence, ageing) and GS2 health answers (mental health) also borrow from it. Prelims has asked about psychoanalysis (2006); Box 1.1 institutes such as NIMHANS and NBRC have appeared in institute–location questions.

• Definition: a science of mental processes, experience and behaviour in different contexts, using methods of the biological and social sciences.
• Two streams: natural science (hypothetico-deductive model; cause, prediction, control) and social science (person in socio-cultural context; multiple causes).
• Mind and brain are interdependent but not identical; the mind can act on the body — visualisation (Ornish), imagery for phobias, psychoneuroimmunology.
• Common sense is hindsight; science predicts and tests. Dweck (1975): children who met failure and learnt to blame lack of effort persisted longer.
• Schools: structuralism (Wundt, 1879, introspection) → functionalism, Gestalt, behaviourism; psychoanalysis (Freud); humanistic (Rogers, Maslow); cognitive; constructivism (Piaget, Vygotsky).
• India: Calcutta lab 1915, department 1916; N.N. Sengupta, G. Bose; Durganand Sinha's four phases ending in indigenisation (late 1970s).

Any knowledge discipline is hard to define, says NCERT, because it keeps evolving and because no one definition captures all it studies. Students were once told that ‘psychology’ comes from two Greek words — psyche (soul) and logos (science or study) — so that psychology was the study of the soul or mind. The discipline has since moved far from that focus and established itself as a science of the processes underlying human experience and behaviour. What it studies lies at several levels — individual, dyadic (two-person), group and organisational — with both biological and social bases, so its methods vary with the problem. A discipline is defined by what it studies and how — more by how. Hence NCERT's formal definition: psychology is a science that studies mental processes, experiences and behaviour in different contexts, using methods of the biological and social sciences to obtain data systematically and organise them as knowledge.

Mental processes are what we use when we think, solve a problem, know or remember. They are reflected in brain activity, which imaging techniques can observe — but brain activity and mental processes are interdependent, not identical. Unlike the brain, the mind has no physical structure or location; it emerges and evolves as our interactions and experiences get dynamically organised into a system. Mental activity goes on even in sleep: we dream, register a knock at the door, and — some psychologists have shown — even learn and remember.

Experiences are subjective: we cannot directly observe or know another person's experience. Psychologists have studied the pain of terminally ill patients, the grief of bereavement, the joy of romance, and ‘esoteric’ experiences such as a yogi's altered state of consciousness in meditation or a drug user's high. Experience depends on internal and external conditions together: a crowded bus on a hot day may not feel uncomfortable if you are going on a picnic with close friends.

Behaviours are the responses or reactions we make and the activities we engage in — a reflex blink when something is thrown at you, a pounding heart in an exam, the decision to see a film. They may be simple or complex, short or enduring; overt (seen by an observer) or covert (internal — the twitch of your hand muscles as you imagine a chess move). All behaviour is associated with or triggered by a stimulus, inside or outside the body: you may see a tiger and run, or think there is a tiger and decide to flee. Some psychologists study behaviour as an association between stimulus (S) and response (R).

Psychology studies behaviour, experience and mental processes and tries to explain how the mind works and how mental processes produce behaviour. Lay observers interpret others through their own viewpoints; psychologists try to minimise such bias in different ways. Some aim to make their analysis scientific and objective; others explain behaviour from the point of view of the experiencing person, holding that subjectivity is a necessary part of human experience. NCERT notes that in the Indian tradition self-reflection and analysis of one's own conscious experience are held to be a major source of psychological understanding, and that many western psychologists now also stress self-reflection and self-knowledge. Whatever the route, all seek to understand behaviour in a systematic and verifiable manner.

Psychology is an old body of knowledge but a young science, if one dates it from the first laboratory in Leipzig in 1879. What kind of science it is remains debated. It is usually classed as a social science, yet in India as elsewhere it is also taught in the faculty of science (B.Sc., M.Sc.). Two fast-growing disciplines borrow from it continuously: neuroscience (brain imaging such as fMRI and EEG lets brain processes be studied as they happen) and computer science (human–computer interaction and artificial intelligence need knowledge of cognitive processes). So psychology today has two parallel streams that sometimes converge and then drift apart.

Modern psychology developed by applying the scientific method, which values objectivity — possible when there is consensus on how a concept is defined and measured. Influenced by Descartes and later by physics, psychology grew by following the hypothetico-deductive model: a theory (a set of interrelated statements explaining a complex phenomenon — physics' Big Bang theory is NCERT's example) yields a hypothesis, a tentative explanation, which is tested against empirical data; if the data point elsewhere, the theory is revised. Most psychological research still follows this route. Psychologists have also been influenced by the evolutionary approach dominant in biology, used to explain phenomena such as attachment and aggression.

Psychology was once called the science of the mind, yet for decades the mind was taboo in psychology because it could not be defined in concrete behavioural terms or located anywhere. NCERT credits neuroscientists such as Sperry and physicists such as Penrose for restoring respect to the idea; some scientists think a unified theory of the mind is possible, though far away. Is the mind the same as the brain? NCERT's answer: the mind cannot exist without the brain, but it is a separate entity.

NCERT supports this with documented cases. Some patients whose occipital lobes (responsible for vision) were surgically removed still responded correctly to the location and configuration of visual cues. An amateur athlete who lost an arm in a motorcycle accident still felt the arm and its movements — his ‘phantom arm’ reached for a coffee cup, and he protested when it was pulled away. A young man with a brain injury insisted that his parents had been replaced by impostors. In each case, NCERT says, part of the brain was damaged but the ‘mind’ remained intact.

Scientists once believed mind and body were unrelated, running parallel to each other. Recent studies in affective neuroscience, NCERT says, show a relationship: positive visualisation and positive emotions can bring significant bodily change. Ornish had patients with blocked arteries visualise blood flowing through them; over time the blockage reduced significantly. Mental imagery — images generated in the mind — has been used to treat phobias (irrational fears of objects and situations). A new discipline, psychoneuroimmunology, emphasises the mind's role in strengthening the immune system.

Almost everyone acts as a psychologist every day, offering ready explanations and even private theories of behaviour — ‘people are basically lazy, so push them, perhaps with a stick’. Such common-sense theories may or may not be true when investigated. NCERT's charge: they are based on hindsight and explain very little. Take a friend who moves far away. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ and ‘Distance makes the heart grow fonder’ say opposite things; if you find a new friend the first is used to explain your behaviour, if you don't the second is. In both cases the explanation follows the behaviour. Psychology looks for patterns that can be predicted, not explained afterwards.

Scientific findings often run against common sense. Carol Dweck (1975) studied children who gave up too easily when faced with difficulty or failure. Common sense says: give them easy problems so success builds confidence, then harder ones. Dweck trained two groups for 25 days on mathematics problems. One got only easy problems and always succeeded. The other got a mix of easy and difficult problems; when they failed, they were told the failure was because they had not tried hard enough and were persuaded to keep trying. On a new set of problems, the always-successful group gave up faster after failure than the group that had experienced failure and learnt to attribute it to lack of effort.

Other beliefs once common in some cultures — that men are more intelligent than women, or that women cause more accidents than men — have been shown by empirical studies to be untrue. Common sense also says that you cannot give your best before a large audience; studies show that if you have practised well, the presence of others may actually improve performance. NCERT adds that psychologists differ from astrologers, tantriks and palm readers because they systematically examine propositions against data to develop principles.

Modern psychology, shaped largely by western developments, has a short history; it grew out of ancient philosophy. Its formal beginning is dated to 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt set up the first experimental laboratory in Leipzig, Germany. Wundt studied conscious experience and wanted to analyse its building blocks; psychologists of his time analysed the structure of the mind through introspection — subjects describing their own mental processes in detail — and so were called structuralists. Introspection was judged less scientific because its reports could not be verified by outside observers, and new perspectives followed.

• Functionalism — William James, who set up a laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts soon after Leipzig, said psychology should study what the mind does and how behaviour helps people deal with their environment and satisfy their needs. For James, consciousness as an ongoing stream interacting with the environment was the core of psychology. The educational thinker John Dewey used functionalism to argue that people seek to function effectively by adapting to their environment.
• Gestalt psychology — arose in Germany in the early 20th century as a reaction to Wundt's structuralism. It studied the organisation of perception: what we experience is more than the sum of its components. Lights flashing in sequence are seen as movement; a film is a series of still pictures seen as motion. Experience is holistic — a Gestalt.
• Behaviourism — around 1910, John Watson, influenced by Ivan Pavlov's work on classical conditioning, rejected mind and consciousness as subject matter: the mind is not observable and introspection cannot be verified. Psychology should study behaviour or responses to stimuli that can be measured objectively. B.F. Skinner applied behaviourism to a wide range of situations and popularised it; behaviourists dominated for several decades.
• Psychoanalysis — Sigmund Freud saw behaviour as the dynamic expression of unconscious desires and conflicts, often for pleasure (and often sexual) gratification, and founded psychoanalysis as a system to understand and cure psychological disorders.
• Humanistic perspective — Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow took a more positive view, stressing free will and the natural striving to grow and unfold one's potential. They argued that behaviourism, treating behaviour as determined by the environment, undermines human freedom and dignity and is mechanistic.
• Cognitive perspective — aspects of Gestalt and structuralism combined into a focus on how we know the world. Cognition is the process of knowing — thinking, understanding, perceiving, memorising, problem solving. Some cognitive psychologists see the mind as an information-processing system like a computer that receives, processes, transforms, stores and retrieves information.
• Constructivism — modern cognitive psychology sees people as actively constructing their minds by exploring the physical and social world. Piaget's theory of child development is constructivist: the child constructs her own mind. Vygotsky went further: the mind is a joint cultural construction, emerging through interaction between children and adults.

These approaches gave psychology multiple perspectives, each with its own focus, strengths and weaknesses; the chapter's summary calls contemporary psychology ‘multivocal’ — its approaches are not mutually exclusive, and each offers insight into human functioning.

The Indian philosophical tradition, NCERT says, is rich in its focus on mental processes and reflection on consciousness, self, mind–body relations, and functions such as cognition, perception, illusion, attention and reasoning. Yet these roots did not shape modern psychology in India, which remains dominated by western psychology, though some attempts — in India and abroad — have tried to establish the truth value of assertions in Indian traditions through scientific studies.

The modern era began in the Department of Philosophy at Calcutta University, which introduced the first syllabus of experimental psychology and set up the first psychology laboratory in 1915; the university started the first Department of Psychology in 1916 and a Department of Applied Psychology in 1938. Early experimental work was shaped by Dr N.N. Sengupta, trained in the USA in Wundt's experimental tradition; Professor G. Bose, trained in Freudian psychoanalysis, founded the Indian Psychoanalytical Association in 1922. The universities of Mysore and Patna were other early centres. Today there are two UGC-supported centres of excellence, at Utkal University (Bhubaneswar) and the University of Allahabad, and about 70 universities offer psychology (NCERT's figure).

Durganand Sinha, in Psychology in a Third World Country: The Indian Experience (1986), traced the history of modern psychology as a social science in India in four phases: (1) until independence — experimental, psychoanalytic and testing research mirroring the West; (2) until the 1960s — expansion into branches, with a wish for an Indian identity pursued by applying western ideas to Indian situations; (3) after the 1960s — problem-oriented research on Indian society, and a realisation of the limits of depending on western psychology; (4) from the late 1970s — indigenisation, rejecting the western framework in favour of a culturally relevant one. This last phase produced both indigenous psychology (rooted in the Indian cultural context and relevant to society) and Indian psychology (based on the traditional knowledge system of ancient texts and scriptures). Today psychology in India is more contextual, contributes to world psychology, and works at new interfaces with the neuro-biological and health sciences.

Psychologists in India now work with children with special needs, in hospitals as clinical psychologists, in corporate HRD and advertising departments, in sports directorates, in the development sector and in the IT industry.

NCERT describes eleven main fields and a list of emerging ones.

Any discipline that deals with people recognises psychology's relevance, and psychologists recognise other disciplines in turn — hence an interdisciplinary approach. In studying brain and behaviour, psychology shares knowledge with neurology, physiology, biology, medicine and computer science; in studying behaviour in a socio-cultural context, with anthropology, sociology, social work, political science and economics; in studying the mental activity of creating literature, music and drama, with literature, art and music. NCERT sums up: psychology is located at the intersection of many fields concerned with human functioning.

Psychology both satisfies curiosity about human nature and offers solutions to problems at many levels: personal (a daughter facing an alcoholic father, a mother dealing with a problem child), family (lack of communication), group or community (terrorist groups, socially isolated communities), and national or international. Problems of education, health, environment, social justice, women's development and inter-group relations are pervasive. Their solutions need political, economic and social reform, but also interventions at the individual level, because many are largely psychological — rooted in unhealthy thinking, negative attitudes towards others and oneself, and undesirable patterns of behaviour.

Media have helped the public see psychology's potential — counsellors and therapists on television discuss problems of children, adolescents, adults and the elderly, and analyse social change, population, poverty, violence and environmental degradation. Psychologists design and run intervention programmes and work in schools, hospitals, industries, prisons, business organisations, military establishments and private practice.

Psychology is also personally useful. Some of us think very highly of ourselves and reject contradicting feedback — a defensive behaviour; others habitually run themselves down. Neither lets us grow; we need a positive and balanced understanding of ourselves. Psychological principles can be used to build good study habits, improve learning and memory, solve personal and interpersonal problems through sound decision-making, and reduce examination stress.

The chapter has three activities, a question in the introduction, a question inside the branches section, and two project ideas. Short outlines follow.

The eight review questions at the end of the chapter (pages 17–18). Try each first, then open the outline.

Numbers

One-liners

• Psychology: a science of mental processes, experience and behaviour in different contexts.
• A discipline is defined by what it studies and, even more, by how it studies.
• Mind and brain are interdependent but not identical; the mind has no physical location.
• Behaviour may be overt or covert; all of it is linked to some stimulus, internal or external.
• Psychology runs in two streams: natural science (cause, prediction, control) and social science (person in context, multiple causes).
• Common sense explains after the event; science predicts and tests.
• Wundt's structuralism used introspection; behaviourism rejected it as unverifiable.
• Gestalt: experience is more than the sum of its parts.
• Humanists (Rogers, Maslow) stressed free will and growth against mechanistic behaviourism.
• Piaget: the child constructs her mind; Vygotsky: the mind is a joint cultural construction.
• Sinha's four phases end in indigenisation — indigenous psychology and Indian psychology.
• Psychiatrists can prescribe medicines; clinical psychologists cannot.

Traps to avoid

• ‘Study of the soul’ is the etymology (psyche + logos), not NCERT's modern definition.
• Covert behaviour is still behaviour — e.g. muscles almost twitching while imagining a chess move.
• Dweck's persistent group had met failure and learnt to blame lack of effort, not lack of ability.
• Piaget was Swiss, not Russian, despite NCERT's ‘another Russian psychologist Vygotsky’.
• Calcutta: laboratory 1915, Department of Psychology 1916, Applied Psychology 1938.
• Gestalt arose in Germany as a reaction to structuralism — not to behaviourism.
• Humanism reacted against both behaviourism (mechanistic) and psychoanalysis (pessimistic).
• The economics Nobels NCERT names are Simon, Kahneman and Schelling — not Amartya Sen.
• Raga-based music therapy: NCERT says its efficacy is still to be proven.
• Ahluwalia climbed Everest in 1965 before his war injury — NCERT's sentence implies the reverse.
• Affective neuroscience shows a mind–body link; NCERT's ‘mind and behaviour’ is a slip.
• In the current book perception is Chapter 4, not the ‘Chapter 5’ NCERT mentions for Gestalt.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Direct Prelims questions from this chapter are rare. Prelims 2006 asked which pair was wrongly matched among Sigmund Freud–psychoanalysis, Anna Freud, Milton Friedman and Eric Kandel — the chapter settles the Freud pair. (Trap: the Anna Freud pair, ‘child psychiatry’, is loosely worded — she was a pioneer of child psychoanalysis without medical training, which is this chapter's psychologist–psychiatrist distinction — but Kandel, a neuroscientist who won the 2000 medicine prize for memory research, paired with ‘literature’ is the clearly wrong pair, so the key (d) stands.) Learn the school ↔ founder pairs (Wundt–structuralism, James–functionalism, Watson–behaviourism, Freud–psychoanalysis, Rogers/Maslow–humanistic, Piaget/Vygotsky–constructivism) and the Nobel ↔ field pairs in Box 1.1.
• Box 1.1's Indian institutions are worth one reading: institute–location questions have included NIMHANS, Bangalore (2000) and the National Brain Research Centre, Gurgaon (2008). Read them alongside the trap notes on NIMHANS's dates and NBRC's location at Manesar.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS4 Ethics: this chapter is the foundation, not the answer. Emotional intelligence (2013, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021), attitude (2014, 2020, 2021), empathy and compassion (2022) and decision-making with digital technology or AI (2021, 2024) are answered from later psychology chapters — but open with this chapter's vocabulary: mental processes, experience and behaviour; overt and covert behaviour; cognition; the humanistic view of growth; Dweck's effort attribution; Simon and Kahneman on the limits of rational choice.
• Essay: topics on perception, self-knowledge and judgement — ‘Your perception of me is a reflection of you…’ (2021), ‘The process of self-discovery has now been technologically outsourced’ (2021), ‘Visionary decision-making happens at the intersection of intuition and logic’ (2023) — can draw on the subjective nature of experience, the Indian emphasis on self-reflection, common sense versus tested knowledge, and the cognitive approach.
• GS1 Society / GS2 Health: when a question concerns suicide, ageing, violence or mental health, NCERT's ‘Psychology in everyday life’ gives the frame — problems have personal, family, community and national levels, and need both structural reform and individual-level intervention.
• Answer frame for a GS4 theory question: define with the psychological term → name the school or scholar it comes from (attributed) → an administrative example → a balancing limitation → a one-line conclusion on practice.

Tap an option. NCERT's own exercise questions come first; the rest test the figures and common confusions.

Open any question to attempt it in the Question bank — your attempt is saved to your progress.