It doesn't matter if you're a student or a Psychologist, but how annoying is it that people think that just because you study Psychology, that you have answers to questions like "why would a person do a, b or c?" and if your only response are fairly logical responses, they're like "don't you study psychology..shouldn't you know why people do certain things?".
Pet peeve
- Thread starter psych844
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The most important part of my training was how to answer questions like that. Just kidding. The related question is "are you analyzing me?" Depending on the seriousness of the question the person is asking or intending, I will either respond with a humorous flip comment or if they are really interested then I will provide some education about mental illness and how it is not predictive of the behavior in question or how the brain really works or principles of behaviorism.
I usually reply that people's responses to events is part personality psychology (what makes people unique) and social psychology (psychological processes that make us similar), and while Clinical Psychologists use knowledge from both areas, it's not necessarily a Clinical Psychologists focus nor expertise, to explain why your mother-in-law doesn't seem appreciative of your cooking.
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Like smalltownpsych, I usually get the "are you psychoanalyzing me right now?" I wish people could be more original.
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It is definitely everyone thinking they can do psychology, but then when I posit the same assumption the other way they get offended (e.g. Explaining an economics principle). When you actually get down to "real" psychology, it definitely isn't the case.
