2018 Psychology Summer Conference

Keynote speaker: Neil Kirby

Title: What can Psychology and Psychologists offer society?

Psychology as a scientific discipline can help to provide an understanding of human behaviour and the thoughts and feelings that contribute to behaviour at the level of individuals, groups, organisations and society.

At each of these different levels, it takes an evidence based approach – quantitative and qualitative, experimental and observational – defining concepts and developing theories that can be tested and used as a basis for interventions to achieve competence and quality-of-life outcomes. A scientific psychology also evaluates the relative extent to which different interventions achieve or fail to achieve these outcomes.

There are two basic ways in which a scientific psychology can contribute to society. The first and more traditional contribution involves training professional psychologists to have expertise in dealing with specific aspects of behaviour, such as clinical psychologists, health psychologists, organisational psychologists, sport psychologists and educational psychologists. The second contribution involves providing students in tertiary education and, more recently in secondary education, with psychological knowledge and skills that they can use in different kinds of jobs and in their personal lives.

For more than 100 years scientific psychology has evolved its evidence based interventions and associated professional training to, not only deal with problems in society, but also to facilitate changes in society designed to improve competence and quality of life outcomes.  To maximise its capacity to deal with societal problems and achieve these outcomes, scientific psychology needs to not only continue to improve its evidence based interventions, but it also needs to continue to improve its associated professional and educational training.