Folk psychology, or commonsense psychology, is the natural capacity to explain and predict the behavior and mental states of other people. Processes and items encountered in daily life such as pain, pleasure, excitement and anxiety use common linguistic terms as opposed to technical or scientific jargon.
Folk psychology and analogy are linked. The easiest way to describe something is through references to familiar items. In this way, the union between analogy and folk psychology was inevitable.
Traditionally, the study of folk psychology has focused on how everyday people—those without formal training in the various academic fields of science—go about attributing mental states. This domain has primarily been centred on intentional states reflective of an individual's beliefs and desires; each described in terms of everyday language and concepts such as “beliefs”, "desires”, “fear”, and “hope".
Read more about Folk Psychology: Contention
Famous quotes containing the words folk and/or psychology:
“Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He’s the chap who makes it possible for civilised folk to despise war.”
—Allan Massie (b. 1938)
“Psychology has nothing to say about what women are really like, what they need and what they want, essentially because psychology does not know.... this failure is not limited to women; rather, the kind of psychology that has addressed itself to how people act and who they are has failed to understand in the first place why people act the way they do, and certainly failed to understand what might make them act differently.”
—Naomi Weisstein, U.S. psychologist, feminist, and author. Psychology Constructs the Female (1969)