It largely covers laboratory and field studies of behavior, with relevant ideas from evolutionary biology, genetics, brain science, philosophy, economics, sociology, and the arts. Psychology is the science of the mind. It is a science because it aims to explain the greatest number of facts with the fewest number of assumptions, its hypotheses are supposed to be falsifiable by empirical tests, and its theories are lawfully connected to other sciences, particularly biology. But psychology is also intimately connected to the social sciences, because social phenomena arise when individual people perceive and react to one another. And it is connected to the arts and humanities, because works of art and scholarship are products of the human mind.
Psychology is a vast discipline.
Its topics range from the gill-withdrawal reflex of the sea slug to the thought processes that make people fight wars. Its methods range from molecular biology to literary criticism. Students at other universities often complain that an introductory course in psychology is a bewildering hodgepodge of unconnected facts and incommensurable theories. They are right, but it is unavoidable, because that's what psychology is. I deal with this dilemma by giving you two sources of information.