【正文】 e career change, or a woman coping with the stress of her husband’s deterioration from Alzheimer’s disease. However, the subject might also be a chimpanzee learning to use symbols to municate, a white rat navigating a maze, or a sea slug responding to a danger signal. An individual might be studied in its natural habitat or in the controlled conditions of a research laboratory. Many researchers in psychology also recognize that they cannot understand human actions without also understanding mental processes, the workings of the human mind. Much human activity takes place as private, internal eventsthinking, planning, reasoning, creating, and dreaming. Many psychologists believe that mental processes represent the most important aspect of psychological inquiry. As you shall soon see, psychological investigators have devised ingenious techniques to study mental events and processesto make these private experiences public. The bination of these concerns defines psychology as a unique field. Within the social sciences, psychologists focus largely on behavior in individuals, whereas sociologists study the behavior of people in groups or institutions, and anthropologists focus on the broader context of behavior in different cultures: Even so, psychologists draw broadly from the insights of other scholars. Psychologists share many interests with researchers in biological sciences, especially with those who study brain processes and the biochemical bases of behavior. As part of the emerging area of cognitive science, psychologists’questions about how the human mind works are related to research and theory in puter science, artificial intelligence, and applied mathematics. As a health sciencewith links to medicine, education, law, and environmental studiespsychology seeks to improve the quality of each individual’s and the collective’s wellbeing. Although the remarkable breadth and depth of modern psychology are a source of delight to those who bee psychologists, these same attributes make the field a challenge to the student exploring it for the first time. There is so much more to the study of psychology than one expects initiallyand, because of that, there will also be much of value that you can take away from this introduction to psychology. The best way to learn about the field is to learn to share psychologists’ goals. Let’s consider those goals. To appreciate the uniqueness and unity of psychology, you must consider the way psychologists define the field and the goals they bring to their research and applications. By the end of the book, we will encourage you to think like a psychologist. In this first section, we’ll give you a strong idea of what that might mean. Many psychologists seek answers to this fundamental question: what is human nature? Psychology answers this question by looking at processes that occur within individuals as well as forces that arise within the physical and social environment. In this light, we formally define psychology as the scientific study of the behavior of individuals and their mental processes. Let’s explore the critical parts of this definition: scientific, behavior, individual, and mental. The scientific aspect of psychology requires that psychological conclusions be based on evidence collected according to the principles of the scientific method. The scientific method consists of a set of orderly steps used to analyze and solve problems. This method uses objectively collected information as the factual basis for drawing conclusions. We will elaborate on the features of the scientific method more fully in Chapter 2, when we consider how psychologists conduct their research. Behavior is the means by which organisms adjust to their environment. Behavior is action. The subject matter of psychology largely consists of the observable behavior of humans and other species of animals. Smiling, crying, running, hitting, talking, and touching are some obvious examples of behavior you can observe. Psychologists examine what the individual does and how the individual goes about doing it within a given behavioral setting and in the broa