Thinking Using the 6 Principles of Psychology

What is psychology? The study of the mind? Ok, I can get that, but what does things does it deal with? Well, there's Pavlov's dogs and theory, there are studies of babies, of emotion, there are things like Rorschach tests and self-report tests. There are a million different biases and a whole bunch of wacky history and odd things like Eugenics. But, if someday in the future, some random day 5 years from now, I were to sit down and try to think of what I learned in Psychology, there can be no doubt in my mind that it would be the 6 principles of psychology. These 6 things have become so drilled into my mind that they randomly jump out at me in real life scenarios. "Hey Jay, have you heard that the reason why fat people get diabetes is because they drink Mello Yello?" "Well gosh," I think to myself, that most likely isn't true, obviously someone forgot that correlation doesn't mean causation! There is no way for me to think nowadays without these 6 principles somehow coming up, and I can't see that ever going away, not even in 5 years. Is that really a bad thing? No, it's not, and I can safely say that all in all, psychology was a good class for me, because pulling out even one thing that I will remember forever tells me that I am in some way different. So, in a weird sense, in a class about how the mind changes and works, psychology changed me.