Challenges of Psychology

I found Chapter 1 to be a very good base for psychology. One thing I found very interesting was the fifth challenge of psychology, which is that people's behavior is shaped by culture. The text explains this with the example of the difference in how European Americans and Asian Americans look at pictures. I have also noticed how cultures shape peoples behavior and the ideas and thoughts that they have. I experienced this in January when I attended Youth In Government. While I was there, I was in a program area called National Issues Forum, where we discussed national and international issues and debated and proposed ideas and ways to solve these problems. In our group we had a lot of foreign exchange students that were from Asian countries who came to study in America and go to college in America. What I noticed was that their ideas were often different then the rest of ours and that for certain issues dealing with immigration, education, and even health care, they had different thoughts and feelings. Another thing that was interesting was their way of questioning. They had some of the most deep and well thought out personal questions of anyone there.


I also liked the challenge about how people differ from each other in thinking, emotion, personality, and behavior and that people respond in different ways to the same situation. I related this to soccer because our coach has to approach different players in different ways based on how they think the player will respond. Like for some players my coach can be super blunt and criticize them straight out, while with other players who take it more offensively my coach has to tone down the criticism and approach the situation differently.