by The Open University
Available in 28 free installments
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In many societies and cultures psychology is now a very visible part of everyday life.
This unit aims to increase your knowledge of psychology and provide you with the tools to think about psychological issues.
In many countries psychology has an impact on policy, practice and culture in general.
Psychological research and knowledge may sometimes be developed from common sense, but, as a discipline, psychology is different from common sense in that it is evidence-based and the result of systematic research.
Psychology has diverse roots ? in medicine, philosophy, biology, psychoanalysis and ethnography.
Psychological knowledge, like all knowledge, is a product of different cultures, historical periods, ways of thinking, developing technologies and the acceptability of different methods and kinds of evidence.
There is no single ‘right? way to answer psychological questions: psychology, at the start of the twenty-first century, is a multifaceted discipline.
Original Copyright © 2002 The Open University. Now made available within the Creative Commons framework under the CC Attribution – Non-commercial licence (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/).
