Thought-Provoker: predicting human behavior

There is little that is more complex than understanding and predicting human behavior, indeed, it's exceedingly complicated.

Psychologists are positioned to understand aspects of the human condition; and that certain attitudes, values and behaviors might go together in some (or many people), while other attitudes, values and behaviors might not. We Psychologists make probability assessments based on this. The examples below are quite simplistic and should be relatively easy to relate to, however, they do illustrate the point.

For example, if I take a group of American political conservatives and a group of American political liberals of similar economic standing and ask them about their views on key social issues, I have a good idea about how they will respond to the questions put before them. Liberals will be more focused on the government promotion of fairness and equality and the retention of key State assets, while conservatives will be more focused on market considerations, privatization of State assets, the endorsement of a ruling elite and the meritocracy of individuals.

Another example, this time in an HR context: if I conduct interviews with extroverts and introverts, I can, with a reasonable degree of certainty, predict that the introverts might have a smaller social network, be quieter in the workplace, and be less likely to be distracted by peripheral issues than will the extroverts.

But of course, there can be individual exceptions due to differences in people. Probability assessment/prediction of the human condition is all about likelihoods, not certainties.