SOC Sunday: I Chose Psychology

Today’s (optional) prompt: How did you settle on your major/career choice?

My college major was psychology. I picked that because of all the subjects I took as a sophomore, when I had to declare, it was the one with the most interesting textbooks. Even though I pretty much always knew I was going to be a writer, I chose not to major in English, because in the back of my mind I was thinking that no one makes a living as an English major. I was trying to be practical, but not so practical that I got stuck with something boring like accounting. 

I suck at numbers anyway - although I'm pretty fascinated with social science statistics, which turns real-world behavioral data into the kind of numbers that scientists use as evidence for their theories. Deep down, I've always been a bit of a scientist as well as a writer. 

To this day, one of my major pet peeves is still inaccurate portrayals of scientific data in the popular media. I blow a gasket when someone on the evening news says a study "proves" this or that. There is no "prove" in science. There is testing and evidence, testing and evidence. 

It turns out a psychology major is actually great preparation for writing novels. You have to be able to get inside your characters' heads and make them believable to the reader, so you have to know how human beings think and why they're motivated to do the things they do. Without realistic motivations, characters fall apart, and plots fall completely apart.