Read the fine print,
I enjoy going to San Francisco using BART ( I live outside San Francisco in the East Bay) , and walking around, making some photographs and just some general meandering. When I am in Chinatown I visit Dragon House at 455 Grant Street because its like seeing a museum of mostly Chinese, but also art from other asian countries.
Or if you are adventurous, try the Love Project, 509 Leavenworth St.
Most of my photographs are about myself, or what think about human behavior. I prefer the sociological concept of “normative behavior” as opposed to the psychological concept of “normal behavior. What they show is people doing normal things and I think its incredible given that each of us having unique lifes can even talk to each other.
Normative behavior is about how people behave, behavior that most people do, and while its impossible to measure this 100%, as a concept it is empirically possible to measure this and it only measures the behavior, not the intent, not why did the person behave like this, only that they did.
In psychology this concept of “normal” assumes that there is a common psychology and on any variable you can construct a “normal curve”( aka Bell shape curve, basically the plotting the means of the standard deviations) and place people somewhere along that curve and then psychology “explains” why people occupy different locations on the curve relative to their specific “quantity” of the normal quality or category.
Where normative behavior is nothing more than how many people do a certain behaviour, psychology is not only about what is the behavior, but about why they behave like that and once you put it like that you are assuming there is a common psychology, which is the cause of the behaviour which are just quantative differences and people who do not behave like the normal are deviant, not from the common behavior as in “normative behavior” but from the common psychology and this can be qualitatively measured.
In other words, psychology claims to understand behavior based on the premise that all people are “naturally the same” and the behavior of an individual can be understood by how much or how little they have of this common psychological category, i.e. it claims to understand the “why” a person behaved like this.
On the other hand Sociology just says this is the behavior, no attempt to say wholly, just that normative behavior is how people behave. When you have a society there is normative behavior. Not all people behave like, most do, and that empirical (theoretically empirically observable) observation does not attempt to “understand” the different behaviour, only to observe and record it,
I believe that people do not “understand human behavior” as a comprehensive subject in itself, there is not a set of “rules”which apply to everyone. Obviously some people understand the behavior of some other people better than others, and we know this by their ability to successfully predict behavior , such as in the stock market, in marketing, etc. but evensong the same methodology of people who are successful they are only successful in specific situations and not in very situation.
To suggest that there is common psychology which all people have and that their behavior can be understood and explained by the quantitative location of any individual from the common psychology is to say that the human being is like a machine and when one of the parts breaks down you just need to fix the part, i. e. a job for psychologists.
Sociology on the other hand just says any specific behavior may be normative or not, just describing, unless you talking about sociology as a tool to change society, but there is a difference between understanding how culture works to make stable societies and “knowing what is appropriate for everyone.”
If only everyone would do what I tell them to do there would be no problems, and we can each say that, but the only way that comes to be is if one of us uses authoritarian force/violence and then tomorrow there is always a bigger bully.
DISCLAIMER: This my meta level opinion about psychology. Psychologists will differ with this. Many psychologists I have met are serous about understanding behavior and/or helping people. They have their own positions, we live in a world where we not only have many disagreements about human behavior but the disagreements arise because we are trying and communicating.
Psychologists have committed their lives to understanding human behavior and/or helping people and they may be right, if there is such a thing as right, and there is no reason not to conclude that in their efforts they have helped people who might not have been helped without them and have contributed to understanding human behavior.
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