Psychology can be seen as a large tree with infinite branches that try to understand human behavior, so, among this whole set of branches and leaves, there is one that is especially useful and differentiated: we talk about applied psychology, which tries to give concrete solutions to the problems that arise in our daily life.
Our readers may be a little surprised, isn’t that what psychology has always done?Isn’t this science focused from the beginning on helping, responding to, and sustaining the most common and complex human needs?You can say that, surprisingly, the answer is no, it wasn’t always the case.
- “Intelligence is not only about knowledge.
- But also about the ability to apply knowledge in practice.
- “Aristotle?.
Originally, was psychology more focused on gathering information and controlling psychological processes such as attention, memory, learning, or language?This whole passionate, immense and constantly expanding field shapes what is called “basic psychology”.
At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, thanks to the German-American psychologist Hugo Munsterberg, a new leap was made in the history of psychology, a very broad science that finally focused on finding practical and real solutions for human beings, using everything knowledge generated by basic psychology to transform our scenarios, improve learning, well-being and human health. As we can see, it is almost impossible to design the two domains separately. Basic psychology and applied psychology are two fundamental branches of a same tree, a spectacular tree that will continue to grow to improve our environment and our quality of life.
Biographers said he used to read Kant and had a good relationship with William James after proposing to him to work in his psychology lab at Harvard University, but things between them didn’t end well. William James is said to have been interested in investigating the so-called paranormal phenomena, something Wilhelm Wundt’s disciple could not conceive and accept because he is a lover of the goal and, in essence, of the practical.
Munsterberg catalogued everything beyond logic and tangible as the “psychology of abracadabra. “Perhaps that is why, and knowing that his main interest was to increase productivity in companies, he always felt some tension with fellow university students who understood the psychology of the laboratory, from the point of view of observation and experimentation, in order to publish an article and perhaps reverse a theory preconceived by other colleagues.
Hugo Munsterberg laid the foundations of applied psychology with a very specific objective: he wanted to improve the skills of workers in a context where industry and Taylorism already demanded new profiles, more competent people and trained for a more complex work environment.
Although he died in the early 1950s, his contribution to the field of applied psychology was decisive and immense, established the origin of industrial psychology, developed multiple tests on professional competences and even laid the foundations for legal psychology by creating a scale to assess the reliability of testimonies.
We said at the beginning that much of the tools and knowledge used by applied psychology come directly from basic psychology, however, we can say that, as whenever we do practical work, the application and development of a work ends up generating new knowledge, new data and new concepts. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand that applied psychology can often achieve some independence from basic concepts.
Thus, we also understand that applied psychology can have infinite fields of action, areas that encompass many of our most everyday contexts and where, through its use, we can find solutions, improve skills, improve processes, innovate . . . In this article, let’s cite some examples.
“This theory, which finds no practical application in life, is a stunt of thought. “Sami Vivekananda?
Each field of action gives rise to a different profile in the exercise of the profession, are aspects of applied psychology that are part of our society, where, without a doubt, there are many other areas to detail, such as emergency psychology, circulation psychology, aging, etc. These are just small examples that allow us to understand the multiple scenarios in which psychology can be valuable, where good professionals will always try to cover all needs, all problems.