• Question: Is a psychologist ever off duty? Do you ever find yourself analysing people without even realising

    Asked by anon-284774 on 5 Mar 2021.
    • Photo: Alex Baxendale

      Alex Baxendale answered on 5 Mar 2021:

      There is always the temptation to use what you know to try to ‘read’ people, but people are so complicated and you don’t always know the full story, so it doesn’t really work too well! A lot of the ideas we have about how people work rely on multiple pieces of information, and in the real world it’s difficult to find these out. We can’t give people a questionnaire on the spot to figure out how anxious they are, we can only make guesses which aren’t reliable. There have of course been times when I have analyzed what someone has said, but in the end that analysis isn’t really that useful, it’s just a bit interesting!

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 5 Mar 2021:

      Hi Grace,

      I think social psychology has trained me to be ‘off duty psychologist’. In social psychology you learn about the power of crowds and herd mentality and how the more people there are, the less likely they are to do something like seeing someone on the floor unconscious. This is called the ‘bystander effect’. And I witnessed this first-hand once!
      I was on a busy London train and one of the people was getting very aggressive and threatening to kill people. This was a packed train, and no one did anything. This was predictable from psychology, but also quite scary to see it in action. (To note I did report the incident as a good psychologist).
      But generally speaking I don’t really analyse people outside of the context of my studies – more so analyse myself as a member of society from a psychology perspective, and hopefully makes me a better citizen for this.

    • Photo: Harry Piper

      Harry Piper answered on 5 Mar 2021:

      I don’t think I have ever tried to analyze anyone (although there is always the one person who will joke you can read minds – they are very annoying and you have to be quick witted in your replies!). Having said that, applying knowledge is always great fun, and I always used to enjoy applying health psychology to certain behaviors such as motivations and barriers to give blood or stop smoking!

    • Photo: Myrto Efstathiou

      Myrto Efstathiou answered on 5 Mar 2021:

      I am not a therapist and I do not work with patients, but I do tend to consider the motivations and the behaviours of those around me and what I can do to help the person in front of me and support them. However, I have a relevant example in terms of being a psychology researcher. For example, I was watching Star Wars the other day, and several characters have prosthetic limbs. Since one of my topics of interest is to understand our sense of ownership of our body, I was thinking about the prosthesic limb and what you can do to increase the sense of ownership over the prosthetic limb.

    • Photo: Ellen Smith

      Ellen Smith answered on 5 Mar 2021:

      To some extent I definitely use my knowledge in my day to day life, as I’m conscious of what foods might be beneficial for my health and brain function. Although that definitely doesn’t mean I’m super healthy and although I’m aware of what might be best to eat, I often don’t! But no, I wouldn’t say I analyse people, but maybe that’s because that’s not the topic area I focus on.

    • Photo: Anon

      Anon answered on 6 Mar 2021: last edited 6 Mar 2021 3:53 pm

      Psychological theory often pops into my mind when I’m reading or watching the news, I think about why people may have acted in a certain way or why situations develop the way they do. But I don’t ever try to ‘analyse’ people I know. As Alex said, usually you have much less information about a person and their life than you might think!

    • Photo: Dennis Relojo-Howell

      Dennis Relojo-Howell answered on 8 Mar 2021: last edited 8 Mar 2021 11:08 am

      Hi Grace! Psychologists have an intrinsic curiosity to observe behaviour and human interactions. But it’s a common misconception that psychologists analyse people or ‘read’ their minds. Within my research area (clinical psychology and positive psychology), I’m more interested in psychological interventions (looking for ways to help people thrive and flourish), instead of ‘analysing’ them.I don’t think I unconsciously ‘analyse’ people; but I love to listen to people’s stories. I’m more of a listener than a talker. I’m not sure if that falls within ‘analysing people’, or maybe I’m just being another human being listening to another human being.

      As to being off-duty – personally, I tend not to talk about my line of work or the research that I do with my friends and family, or my husband. I only talk about normal stuff; so that’s me being off-duty. Also on weekends, I don’t do any psychology-related work (not even my PhD).

      When I was a teenager, I worked day in day out in order for me and my family to survive. At 16, I worked as a cleaner and as a street vendor selling rugs in Manila. If you have the time, I invite you to go over my profile so you can get to know my journey a bit more. Fortunately, things are a bit different now – which made my approach to work also different. On weekends, I’m just a regular guy who does the grocery, does the laundry, and then eats a meat feast pizza in front of a Netflix series (without psychoanalysing what’s in front of me). 😊

      Good luck with your studies, Grace!

    • Photo: Lisa Orchard

      Lisa Orchard answered on 8 Mar 2021:

      Hi Grace! If we go back to early social psychology, we are all naïve psychologists – that is, everyone likes to explain the world around them. It’s why we make judgements from newspaper headings and very little evidence. My curious nature is what led me to psychology, so I have always been one to try and ‘analyse’ a situation. Although, I think for me I tend to analyse my own behaviour a lot – questioning the way I behave often helps me form research questions.

    • Photo: David McGonigle

      David McGonigle answered on 9 Mar 2021:

      I guess that this question gets to the heart of what people think a ‘psychologist’ is, Grace: not all of us are therapists or real students of human behaviour, so no, I don’t find my self analysing people all the time. However…you’re absolutely right that I can’t help comparing people’s decisions or arguments to various famous experiments or theories in the field. It’s a bit different to ‘analysing’, though, because it’s not so personal. I find that the theories and biases that pop into my mind come from experiments, like, for example: the ‘fundamental attribution error’ (I see you drop a glass once, and so I assume you’re clumsy, rather than it being a one off event); the problems people have with basic probability ( a friend might talk about a certain sportsperson having a ‘hot hand’, where the chance of them getting a new goal/basket/home run is affected by having lots more in the past); and also social influence (my friend is more likely to buy a certain car if I say it’s great, even though a poll of 1000 people say that, 800 times out of 1000, it’s rubbish!). But I’m not immune, either – the fascinating thing about recognising these biases in our thinking is that they still have power, even if you can name and recognise them. I am *absolutely* more likely to buy something if my mates tell me its great, even if there are 1000s of other people disagreeing with them! It’s part of what makes studying the brain so fascinating…

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