Learning About and Understanding Yourself

Learning about yourself doesn't consist of finding a set of magic keys that will unlock the "great secrets of your mind." Rather, understanding human behaviour is chiefly a matter of discovering thousands of things that you've been thinking and feeling and responding to--but were never rally aware of.
In the many small things that you will discover about yourself, two themes will emerge. The first theme is that you are complex. This means that your thoughts and actions have many causes--we are multi-determined--such as biological, intra-psychic, or environmental. Thus, for example, you cannot say that the cause of mental retardation is brain damage because the social environment in which the brain-damaged individual is brought up  strongly affects the person, as does the person's present environment
The second theme that you will notice is that people are similar to each other and yet different from each other. Biologically we are alike, we develop in similar ways, and we interact with our social context in similar ways. Yet we are not identical. For every statement that is true about people generally, there is a range of individual differences underneath. In other words, Each of us is unique.


Sometimes when you discover something new about yourself, you will feel that it is not very surprising. You may feel that you knew what was "discovered" all along. In the world of psychology,this is called the hindsight bias. The hindsight bias is the feeling you get after you learn something new, that you knew it all along.
Many fields of knowledge can offer you a subjective understanding of human behaviour. Art, literature, and religion are good examples of subjective approaches that can give you important information about yourself or others.But, because it uses the scientific method psychology offers you two things that no other field can:

• First, a set of objective facts about how you think, feel, and behave.
• Second, theories and insights, based on objective facts, that attempt to explain in objective terms WHY--the cause--you think, feel, and act as you do.

You will find that taking an unbiased, objective view of yourself (and others) is a skill that you have to "learn by doing."Also, not everyone appreciates--or even agrees with--the facts that psychologists have discovered about human nature. Psychologists do not agree about what they have learned. Sometimes people resist new knowledge, especially about themselves--like one student advised a friend "don't take psychology; they teach you about yourself and it takes all the fun away.." I believe there's a great deal of  real fun in understanding human behaviour If I did not, I would not bother with any of my blogs or web-sites. Bur whether it's worth your time to learn how to be objective about people, only you can decide.