Everyday and scientific psychology: differences, correlation, comparison table, knowledge, characteristics, relationships, features, similarities

They say that bartenders and taxi drivers are excellent psychologists. Yes, this is partly true, but then they are everyday psychologists. They communicate a lot with different people; extensive life experience allows them to better understand society and give advice. However, their advice and judgments are not always fair from a scientific point of view. You and I have to understand everyday and scientific psychology, their differences and relationships, and define both types.

Everyday psychology: what is it

This is knowledge that is accumulated and used in life. Everyday psychology includes someone’s reasoning, observations, and conclusions regarding a specific situation. For example, children are great at manipulating their parents, but they don't know how to do it with all people.

Everyday psychological knowledge is distinguished by the following:

always specific;
intuitive;
tied to certain conditions, situations, participants.

This type is usually called wisdom.

Features of everyday psychology, what characterizes it:

conclusions are often irrational;
most often there is an erroneous generalization;
judgments are based on fears and personal experiences;
judgments are subject to moods, fashion, rumors;
everyday knowledge is based on random situations and reflections;
the cultural level of everyday psychology is low, it is mundane, often mixed with superstitions.

Another specific characteristic of everyday psychology is that people present their “discoveries” with confidence. They call themselves psychologists, teachers, mentors. Bloggers and Instagrammers are the most striking example of everyday psychology. They are confident that they are right, they will grab the top ranks in the discipline or come to some conclusions based on personal experience, and then pass it off as the ultimate truth. They give ready-made schemes and advice that do not help everyone. So the next time you come across something like this, I recommend being very careful and not believing everything that a “natural psychologist” or an amateur psychologist says. Brightness, novelty, closeness to the majority opinion does not mean that the information is correct.

Verification methods

Everyday knowledge proves its validity only over time, and what loses its relevance is gradually forgotten. In addition, their correctness is confirmed by personal experience, and not by scientifically regulated experiments.

In science, the researcher purposefully models the necessary conditions, rather than waiting for a favorable combination of circumstances. This allows you to study in its entirety the phenomenon of interest by changing the characteristics of the experimental environment.

Due to the fact that scientific knowledge is accumulated and information about a particular object or phenomenon is systematized, it becomes complex and diverse. The resulting material continues to be comprehended and analyzed, becoming fertile ground for its expansion and the emergence of new scientific disciplines.

General psychology develops through the improvement and enrichment of its individual branches. Everyday knowledge does not have a single system and such features.

Scientific psychology: what is it

This is data that is accumulated through research and is used both in theory and in practice, that is, in life. The discipline arose in the 19th century, but life's wisdom accumulated along with the development of society.

Specifics of scientific (academic) psychology, its difference from everyday psychology:

The first is science. The second is someone’s views, the results of reflection, analysis, introspection, and social interaction.
Scientific information is closely related to statistics, mathematical calculations, experiments, experiments.
Scientific data is always rationally summarized and explained. They are carefully verified, confirmed, and do not depend on the emotions or moods of an individual subject or society. They are objective and impartial. As a rule, they are distinguished by a higher cultural and intellectual level.
Facts from science are relevant for the entire society; they take into account the specifics of certain conditions and the differences of individuals.

Next, let's look at the characteristics of everyday and scientific psychology in comparison.

Knowledge about life

So, it is important to understand that everyday psychology is far from science, it is a kind of synthesis of people’s knowledge about life, about themselves, the quintessence of experience, observations and experiences. Of course, conclusions drawn on the basis of subjective experience are unlikely to be objective and acceptable to others. Everyday psychology, its main features and characteristic features:

Everyday psychology, its main features and characteristic features:

1. Specificity and down-to-earthness. Everyday psychology tends to talk about specific people and the situations in which they find themselves; it relies on the subjective experiences of specific people. Usually, as an example, they give you stories that happened to some person who found himself in a certain situation and made certain conclusions for himself (naturally, this conclusion will be relevant and useful for him, but it is not a fact that this knowledge can be widely applicable and used other people).

2. Intuitive nature of knowledge. The peculiarities of everyday psychology are that it relies on intuition, on subjective feelings, and usually no one seeks to check their feelings or try to think about them. This is most often the main limitation of intuitive knowledge - it is almost impossible to explain it to another person, “I just realized something.”

3. Insufficient depth of knowledge. People make conclusions superficially, without examining certain motives, emotions or behavior of other people. As a rule, a conclusion is made quickly, without checking its reliability (this is where fears, beliefs, proverbs, superstitions come from, when people try to follow certain rules just because someone said so; following fashion or relying on popular books or articles lives here , which do not carry any scientific knowledge).

4. The main method is observation. Most of us make conclusions about something based only on periodic, short-term observation, which is not at all consistent with its scientific counterpart. As a result, this leads to a superficial perception of reality, since everything is verified only through personal experience, and, as we know, such a method is extremely subjective and limited.

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5. Everyday psychology does not have a common terminology. The life experience of many people is connected with different times, eras, states, so everyone tends to describe this or that state “in his own words,” into which he puts his own meaning, which only he fully understands. This often leads to misunderstandings and substitution of concepts.

Such knowledge can be presented very confidently and openly, you can be convinced that a given method or point of view is correct, because it is written so in a magazine or because everyone does it. You can also be assured that this postulate has been tested by personal experience. For example, a person celebrated the New Year in a bad mood and the whole next year was not going well for him, after which he carries this knowledge to his friends as a dogma.

It is important to understand that not every person has inner instinct, insight, the ability to notice details and generate everyday psychological knowledge. Therefore, it is always worth remembering that not all other people’s knowledge can be useful for you, but sometimes you can listen and communicate with different people in order to have an idea about a certain phenomenon or learn about someone else’s experience, knowledge of which may be useful

Comparison of everyday and scientific psychology

“Take my advice,” says your friend. “I want to share my experience to help others overcome this difficult situation,” says the blogger. In both cases we are dealing with amateurs, not professionals. The key difference between everyday and scientific psychology is that the first is private, concrete. What helped one person may be completely useless to another, and may even harm a third. This is not the only difference in directions. Let's look at them in more detail, and also talk about the connection between the directions.

Differences between everyday and scientific psychology

The two types differ in the nature of knowledge, content and methods of transferring experience. Let's look at the basics:

The amateur type is the experience of one person, with all its nuances. Psychological knowledge is chaotic and based on intuition. The individual receives them by chance. The experience of science is always systematized, obtained through special experiments, extensive in application, and reflects general laws and patterns.
Amateur knowledge lives only in the sphere where a person received it, only in the life of this person. An individual can convey his knowledge orally or in writing to other people, but still it will only be his experience, his guesses, his considerations. Traditions, rituals, sayings, aphorisms, folk wisdom, proverbs - all these are examples of storing amateur psychology. Often several sources of information contradict each other. For example, for every proverb you can find an “anti-proverb”: “Teaching is light, not teaching is darkness”, “Live forever, learn – you will die a fool.” Information from science is passed down from generation to generation, it is taught in universities, it is stored in books. Scientific knowledge is constantly deepening and expanding.
Amateur conclusions are tied to the situation, specific conditions and time. Using them is very problematic, not every person is suitable for this or that wisdom, and the advice of strangers does not always work. Science is not tied to time and conditions; it is methods, techniques that always work. And if special conditions are needed, then this is always said.

Thus, while one type describes certain phenomena in a versatile and chaotic manner, the other explains them through terms, concepts, definitions, patterns, and cause-and-effect relationships.

The relationship between everyday and scientific psychology (briefly)

You probably already guessed that both types are closely interrelated. Examples of connections and relationships:

professional research is based on life experience (someone noticed something and decided to substantiate it, identify general patterns, find solutions);
psychological science takes its tasks from everyday experience;
The final test of scientific knowledge is the test of life experience.

Does science influence life? Undoubtedly. This is what we usually call practical psychology. We are talking about all the techniques, methods, trainings that we use in life to improve it. All scientific psychological research arises against the background of current problems of society. People suggest what they need - psychologists try to help. According to this, three types can be roughly distinguished: everyday, scientific and practical psychology. The latter combines the other two types.

Most psychologists who have received appropriate training relate to both types. Someone chooses only the theoretical part, but even in this case he is faced with everyday problems of people, because without this it is impossible to put forward and test a hypothesis. For this, everyday observation is used. In psychology, this is one of the methods that involves testing a hypothesis or research results in real conditions (not laboratory ones).

Thus, the specificity of scientific and everyday psychology is as follows: there is a need for everyday psychological knowledge for the development of psychology as a science.

Approaches to the classification of psychological research methods

As we said earlier, the specificity of scientific psychology is that it uses a whole arsenal of scientific methods to accumulate its data. The way in which this or that knowledge was obtained also plays an important role. Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1934) expressed this in the following laconic formula: facts obtained using different cognitive principles are different facts. There is a certain conditionality of the facts obtained in an empirical study by the scheme existing before this empirical study, the hypotheses put forward, preliminary knowledge about the reality being studied, etc. And such a relationship between the facts obtained in the study and the researcher’s preliminary ideas about the phenomena being studied and, accordingly, with the methods used can be traced in all psychological directions. Therefore, the problem of the methodology (means) of psychological cognition is one of the most significant and discussed problems of psychology. There are several views on the classification of psychological research methods. For example, G. Pirov divided the “methods” into:

the actual methods (observation, experiment, modeling, etc.);
methodological techniques;
methodological approaches (genetic, psychophysiological, etc.). (See additional illustrative material.)
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Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein (1889-1960) in “Fundamentals of General Psychology” identified observation and experiment as the main psychological methods. The first was divided into “external” and “internal” (self-observation), the experiment - into laboratory, natural and psychological-pedagogical plus an auxiliary method - a physiological experiment in its main modification (the method of conditioned reflexes). In addition, he identified techniques for studying the products of activity, conversation (in particular, clinical conversation in genetic psychology by Jean Piaget (1896-1980)) and questionnaire. Naturally, time has determined the features of this classification. Thus, the “kinship-ideological” connections between psychology and philosophy deprived it of theoretical methods; a similar affinity with pedagogy and physiology was rewarded by the inclusion of the methods of these sciences in the psychological list. (See additional illustrative material.) We will consider the methods of psychology based on four main positions:

a) non-experimental psychological methods;
b) diagnostic methods;
c) experimental methods;
d) formative methods. (See additional illustrative material.)

Everyday and scientific psychology: briefly connections and differences

Once again we summarize all of the above in the form of a table. So, here’s how everyday psychology differs from scientific psychology:

Criterion	Amateur	Academic
Abstractness/precision of knowledge	Always specific, associated with certain situations and people.	Expressed in laws, concepts and definitions, there is a noticeable desire for generalization.
Nature of knowledge	Based on intuition, trial and error.	Rational and conscious knowledge is always scientifically justified, experimentally confirmed.
Systematization, accumulation, transmission of information	Knowledge dies with man; it lives in folk art.	Passed on from generation to generation through books, recordings, videos, universities, etc.
How information is received	Through personal observations and reflections.	During observations, reflections, experiments.
Volume of information, accuracy of concepts	Knowledge is limited, concepts are vague and ambiguous.	The material is voluminous, the concepts are precisely defined.

The types have something in common, but at the same time they have many differences. The amateur type is the experience of a person or an entire society. The scientific type is a discipline, science as it is.

Two relevant problems compare everyday and scientific psychology. Firstly, there is often a substitution of concepts; people try to pass off their observations as scientific laws and teach others about life (bloggers, Instagrammers, graphomaniacs, etc.). Secondly, professional psychologists lose a huge part of the topics to study. Scientific consideration limits the possibilities of studying objects and phenomena; concepts create rigid boundaries beyond which one cannot go.

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Scientific and everyday psychology: what is the difference?

Everyday psychology - facts obtained through personal observations. This is a subjective understanding of the psychological patterns and characteristics of the world. In another way, everyday psychology is called wisdom.

Sources of everyday psychology:

everyday communication and interaction;

Team work;

people who meet along the path of life.

Examples of everyday psychology: rituals, traditions, folk tales, sayings, proverbs, legends, beliefs and other folk art. Many public pages on the social network VKontakte or websites on the Internet are the result of everyday psychology. That is, this is someone’s personal experience, everyday observations, the story of the life or success of this particular person. Nowadays it is fashionable to understand psychology and talk about self-improvement.

Everyday psychology has an arsenal of tools. For example, art. Through paintings, music, books we get to know the inner world of other people. Each viewer develops his own subjective idea of the author and his life. No terms or theories - only everyday psychology and personal perception. But the main method of everyday psychology is “trial and error.”

Everyday psychology is personal experience and ways of living that suit one person. This is exactly the case when we say “I do this, but it’s not a fact that it will suit you.”

Thanks to everyday psychology, a person knows how to communicate with his own parents, friends, sisters and brothers. However, without certain scientific knowledge, a person does not know how to behave with a new acquaintance. For example, children who are accustomed to manipulating their parents with the help of tears are at a loss when this technique does not work on another adult.

Good everyday psychologists are drivers, security guards, bartenders. They communicate with a large number of people every day, listen to their problems and draw appropriate conclusions.

What is scientific psychology

Scientific psychology is material obtained through experimentation and research. Psychology in scientific terms and theories.

Sources of scientific psychology:

books, scientific articles and other publications;

experiments;

teachers and mentors passing on theoretical experience (university studies in psychology).

The basis of scientific psychology is everyday psychology. Only after noticing something in practice do scientists decide to find a scientific explanation and determine the scale of the process.

Scientific psychology provides general guidelines for interaction. For example, it is known that all people are infected by the emotions of the group; Every person’s brain reacts by increasing their mood to a forced smile. And bright colors excite the psyche of each individual, cold shades make you sad, etc. This means that you can safely use these techniques in everyday life.

The scientific type analyzes the similarities and differences between the two types of psychology. But among the studies it is impossible to find a single list of differences. However, general points can be highlighted:

Object of study. Scientific psychology studies mental processes, everyday psychology studies a specific person or condition. For example, everyday psychology says that all people are different, and scientific psychology explains this by the characteristics of the mental system (temperament).

Generalization. Everyday psychology describes specific people and specific conditions. Often this is abstract and figurative in nature or represented by a stereotype. Scientific psychology generalizes, classifies, systematizes.

A way to gain knowledge. Everyday psychology uses only unorganized observation and introspection. Scientific psychology uses a lot of tools: specially organized observation, experiment, tests, surveys, diagnostics and more.

Method of knowledge transfer. Everyday psychology is transmitted mainly orally, for example, from grandmothers to grandchildren. Or through folk art. Scientific psychology is transmitted through specialized literature, textbooks, and universities.

Facts, arguments, awareness. Everyday psychology does not provide point-by-point explanations. The person simply says that he suddenly realized something or simply knows that it works. Scientific psychology will explain why this works: what hormones are turned on, what lobes of the brain are involved, what mental property is used.

Language. Scientific psychology operates with terms and concepts. Everyday psychology explains something “in its own words,” in a simple way.

Similarities between scientific and everyday psychology

The similarity between scientific and everyday psychology is that they help people understand each other. The result of combining two areas of psychology is practical psychology.

What does the unification of scientific and everyday psychology look like:

The study of the influence of a group on an individual and individuals on a group (psychology of management and leadership).

Determining the features of interaction between two groups or two people.

The study of human uniqueness, behavioral characteristics (personality psychology).

Practical psychology begins with everyday observation and ends with scientific study. And at the third stage, on the contrary, the put forward theoretical hypothesis is tested on special cases in everyday life, the breadth of its application is noted.

Everyday and scientific psychology are important to each other. These are mutually complementary types. Everyday psychology is everyone’s personal experience. Scientific psychology is the generalized experience of the entire society. But is it really possible to draw general conclusions about the laws of society without knowing the psyche of each individual? And it is also impossible to understand systematic knowledge without experiencing it personally in practice. Can a teacher only follow the material written in the textbook, ignoring the environmental conditions and characteristics of the very children with whom he interacts? So, in essence, we are talking about theoretical and practical psychology.

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Sources used:

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