Whenever I tell people that I'm a Psychology major, they normally say something like, "Can you read me?" or, "Oh, don't read me!" Myself, along with other Psychology majors, are tired of hearing this because there are many flaws within it. This gets especially worse when I say I want to go into the field of Applied Behavior Analysis. People think I can read them like Aaron Hotchner on "Criminal Minds." Why am I annoyed by this you ask?
Firstly, reading people's personalities and being able to tells someone's whole life story by talking to them for a few minutes is not what I or any other General Psychology major studies. Even if it was what I am studying, I am only a second year undergraduate Psychology major, so I would not have had the time to learn everything I would need to know about other's behaviors to read them. FBI profilers have had years of experience in the field before they are hired, so it is not something that can be mastered in a year or two.
Applied Behavior Analysis is not at all like what you see on "Criminal Minds." In ABA, we use basic knowledge of how humans operate and run studies to see how we can better improve human lives or our knowledge on people. What you see on "Criminal Minds" is a different kind of behavior analysis. In "Criminal Minds", they use the knowledge gained from previous crimes to catch the bad guys, so studying Applied Behavior Analysis does not mean I can figure out who the bad guys are or read people.
The topics we do learn about are things like schizophrenia, depression and autism. If someone has something obvious like a mental disorder, I may be able to tell. However, this is not something that can be done after fifteen minutes of texting. If I were to mentally diagnose people, I would have to see their behavior a long amount of time and know intimate details of their life- like their thoughts. Since analyzing whether or not someone has a mental disorder takes this much knowledge of a person, it usually means I can only mentally diagnose my favorite TV characters- not someone I met five minutes ago.
Undergraduate Psychology students cannot read people, so please stop asking us to. For whatever reason, people have the impression that we can, and seem disappointed in us or act like we are not good at our majors when we can't. Please, accept the fact that reading people is not what we do.
