It’s basic if you live among people. To interact with them and to roughly know what to expect back. Psychology can give you a good estimation of who you can feel comfortable with and, on the contrary, who you wouldn’t want to be in one room with at all.
As an author of a fiction book, I need to have a simple understanding of how psychology work. In order for my characters to be likable or hateable, they have to reflect the psychological rules. If I have a single mother struggling with her ex, I need she act like one. My villain has to have something positive and human too. My hero must have a dark side as well as not to be too inhuman. There is no way to avoid psychology.
Psychology isn’t anything I have to push myself into, it’s my passion. I love it.
We all have the social bubble we live in. There are certain types of people I know I never naturally interact with. In my case, those are people with too low or too high social status, some particular occupations, and of course, with a geographic distance. For this, I find it very entertaining to be able to secretly watch them dealing with some fabricated situation in reality shows. The shows I love the most is Survivor, Australian Married at First Sight, Wife Swap, The Biggest Loser, and a few more.
Then it comes to psychological experiments.
There are not many things I find more exciting than those. Basically, under close surveillance of specialists, people are roughly pushed to react to some specific situation. The high level of imposed empathy for the testing subject is a big obstacle for the enhanced psychological experiments that were run in the past and are impossible to be found now.
Some of the most tremendous and also scaring experiments are described here.
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