15 Signs That You Are a Psychology Major

Do you ever think that psychology majors might be just a little different than other students? Are there certain characteristics that set you apart? Probably so.

Signs That You're a Psychology Major

Here are 15 sure-fire signs that you are a psychology major:

1. People think you are a mind reader.When you tell people what you are majoring in, they ask if you can read their mind.
2. You spend more time on APA format than any other subject.Your edition of the APA publication manual is dog-eared and the pages are filled with yellow highlighter marks.
3. All of your friends seem to have undiagnosed psychological conditions.You have tried to diagnose yourself and your friends with mental disorders. During yourabnormal psychologyclass, you found yourself constantly discovering new symptoms that explained why your friends behave the way they do.
4. You utilize behavioral training to solve everyday problems.You once usedoperant conditioningto train your roommate to stop leaving his dirty laundry on the floor in your apartment.
5. You can’t stop psychoanalyzing everyone in your life.You are pretty sure that your academic advisor has an oralfixation— he’s always chewing on something, be it a pen, his fingernails, or a stick of gum.
6. You spend more time in the library than you do in your dorm room.You are an old pro atwriting APA papers和实验报告。介绍,方法,结果,discussion — you know the parts of a psychology paper like the back of your hand.
7. You are known as the "listener" in your social group.All of your friends come to you for advice and you love being able to help. You truly do enjoy listening to people talk about their problems, trying to figure out why they think and behave the way they do, and coming up with solutions that might help.
8. You have used the phrase "correlation does not equal causation" more times than you care to admit.You also find yourself critiquing news articles that your friends share on Facebook because they constantly seem to confuse correlation with causation.
9. Psychology experiments are a lot more interesting now.When you volunteer for a psychology study, you find yourself trying to figure out what theindependentanddependent variablesare and what the researcher's hypothesis might be.
10. You can tell the difference betweennegative reinforcementandpunishment— and you get really frustrated when people confuse the two.Which is great, because I've even heard many graduate students say that they are still not 100% clear on some of the major behavioral concepts such as reinforcement, punishment, the unconditioned stimulus, and many other important terms.
11. You often find yourself having to define psychological termstoyour friends and family because you keep using them in daily conversations.And you are starting to think that psychology should be a required class for all students, not just psychology majors. After all, wouldn't the world be a better place if everyone had a better understanding of the human mind and behavior?
12. Whenever you hear the wordnature, the wordnurtureimmediately pops into your head.You also have a much deeper appreciation for how these two forces interact to influence many different aspects of development.
13. When you meet someone new, you immediately assess which stage ofpsychosocial developmentthey are in and how well they are coping with the primary conflict at that stage.You also tend to evaluate which stage of psychosexual development they might be stuck in or whether or not they ever progressed to theformal operational stage of cognitive development.
14. You have a dog named Pavlov, a cat named Thorndike, and a rat named Skinner.Doesn't everyone name their pets after their favorite theorists?
15. You're no longer terrified of statistics.You understand what significance levels, t-tests, standard deviations, and z-scores are. That doesn’t mean you enjoy statistics, however. Youdefinitelystill hate statistics.