Until three years ago, I would have never envisioned myself as a psychology major. For reasons that I no longer recall it was a field of study that I was very critical of. That is, until I took a general psychology course as a general education requirement. I’m always easily swayed by professors with an obvious passion for their field, and my first psychology professor was not only passionate, but wanted her students to love psychology the same way she did.
One of the first things that so strongly appealed to me was how applicable psychology is to daily life, and how useful it could be to me in the future. There are more branches of psychology than I can list here, but some of the fields that I have found the most fascinating to me this far are social psychology and developmental psychology.
Social psychology relates to the media more directly than any of the other fields that were mentioned, particularly in advertisements. There is a famous example from the 2000 Presidential campaign in which the word “RATS” is displayed across the screen for a split second before the word becomes “BUREUCRATS.” This, along with many other advertisements, uses psychology to send the viewer a subliminal message, or sensory stimuli presented before a person can consciously process it.” This use of psychology in the media in turn raises the question of what is ethical or unethical, particularly in this case when the medium is a political campaign advertisement. Is it ethical to appeal to viewers with a subliminal message instead of persuading them to a particular cause with cold hard fact? Is it ethical to use methods against viewers that the campaigners intend to go unnoticed by their potential voters, which they understand people will be unaware of? This is only one of the questions that can be raised concerning the ethics of digital manipulation that is directly related to social psychology. We are bombarded by social psychology everyday through the media, and in almost every other situation we encounter.
I have also been very attracted to developmental psychology, not so much for its usefulness as a career, but the relevance with which it applies to the future I envision for myself. To be entirely truthful, I have never seen myself pursuing a career that will define me. I have always wanted to define myself by family, the family that I have now, and the family that I hope to have in the future. Developmental psychology is therefore a useful resource to refer to when I have children of my own. Erik Erikson developed a theory describing the different stages development that a person experiences, spanning their entire lifespan. These stages include basic trust vs mistrust in infancy, identity vs role confusion in adolescence, generativity vs stagnation (also known as the mid-life crisis) and ego integrity vs despair in old age. I found this theory in particular fascinating. The psychology students that I know often joke that we don’t want to be psychologists to figure out other people’s problems, so much as we want to figure out our own. I very much agree with them, but would have to add that not only does the understanding of these life stages help me make sense of some of the inner conflicts I am experiencing, I also feel that it will help me be a more effective parent and spouse in the future.
