"May you live in interesting times," goes an old Chinese curse. Well, these are

certainly interesting times tbr psychologists. The field seems to be exploding

in all directions at once. The long-silnmering controversy between research and

dinical practice has heated up, sometimes to the boiling point. "New age" cults,

beliefi, and philosophies, with a quasi-scientific veneer, continue to pose a se-

rious challenge m scientific psychology; it is getting harder and harder fi)r the

public to distingnish reputable psychological work from what R. D. Rosen

(1977) once called "psychobabble." And, perhaps most passionately, al-gmments

over multiculturalism--over whether and how to incorporate into the basic cur-

riculum the experiences of diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural gronps~have

erupted on many campuses,

These developments present some difficult but exciting challenges for psy-

chology teachers and textbook authors. In this book, we embracc those chal-

lenges by confronting the question of how our discipline can best fulfill its mis-

sion of understanding human behavior and contributing to hulnan welfare.

Psychology, we feel, is not only a body of knowledge; it is a way of approach-

ing and analyzing the world, indeed, it s a way of asking questions about every

thing from the smallest curiosities to the largest matters of lif~ and death. Our

g0al, therefore, is not only to convey the basic content of psychology, but also

to get students to reflect on and use what they learn to show thenl what it is

like m think like a psychologist.