Regardless of who you are, you most likely have confused philosophy and psychology with each other or thought they were the same thing. So what makes them separate from each other? Can we say which one is more useful?
I think we can. Psychology is the study of the mind and brain of humans. It’s trying to find out how the minds of people work in social interactions and how the mind and brain affect mental health. Psychology is more specific, yet some might find it more important than philosophy. While knowing how to gain, and how you gain knowledge, solve problems, and view life (through philosophy) is important to some, it might mean nothing without human connection. And psychology dives into that more than a broad philosophy does. Psychology is used to understand the human mind, which also includes how people react in different situations. You gain an understanding of how a normal person reacts to things, and because of this you change the way you interact with people, and not just in disagreements. Whether it be using good manners while eating, sugarcoating your words, changing the way you speak to people, etc. These are all examples of your understanding of the human mind, and your want, even need, to satisfy it, to make people feel comfortable. In other cases, you even use the understanding of your own mind, to know that to make someone comfortable would be to make yourself uncomfortable. Regardless of the extremes, psychology is very clearly important to understand to a certain extent.
Philosophy is the study of many questions about existence, values, the mind, language, etc. Philosophy encompasses many aspects of your daily life without you ever knowing, from problem solving to morals. The greatest philosophers generally ask the hard questions about what is the truth in life. From politics to the correct way we should gain/acquire knowledge. For example, the Socratic Method, which entails asking questions whenever possible to promote dialogue and/or more critical analysis of things. From socratic note taking to socratic circles, this is just one of the many ways you might use philosophy and the results of it without even realizing. Beyond this, you unknowingly have a philosophy in the way you approach everyday problems, a set way of rationalizing and going about things. For example, are you a realist, someone who accepts things how they are and who deals with them accordingly with the facts present; or an idealist, someone who would rather think of the best way something could be, then try to find a way to achieve that best outcome. Most people are mixes of philosophies, and regardless, everyone has a one they abide by.
However, let’s take a step back and come to know how psychology came to be. Psychology can be traced back to emerging from philosophy. In my eyes, this is the biggest determinant of which is more “useful.” Without philosophy, there is no psychology, it is the precursor to so much of what we have today. Ranging from things like psychology, to politics, to even the way you view morality and death. There are so many links you can’t ignore, and while psychology has served to refine a lot of this, i.e. WHY do people think of morals these ways, HOW does the mind affect the way people prefer to gather information, it simply can’t work as a stand alone. What comes after the why and how?
Unlike philosophy, it can’t be applied to as many things, anything in which there is no human interaction is hard to correlate to psychology. Yet philosophy thrives when it comes to problems with oneself, psychology helps you understand why they are there. Philosophy helps you not only begin that process of understanding, but how to proceed after the fact. To be blunt, I think that the simple understanding of why it happens, and how they affect people, isn’t enough. As mentioned previously, psychology helps you determine why to act a certain way in social situations. However the problem solving skills don’t come with understanding the mind, they come with using the mind AND your understanding of it to come up with solutions and your own ideas. Philosophy encompasses essentially anything that can be left up to interpretation, and for these reasons, I believe philosophy to be the clear choice when deciding which one you should choose to study, or, which one you find more “useful.”
