Why Study Psychology?
As the runners lined up to start the 1986 NCAA 10,000 meter championship, Kathy O. was the odds-on-favorite. She had broken high school track records in three distances and recently set a new American collegiate record for the 10,000 meter race. Her parents, who were always supportive fans, watched from the sidelines. Kathy got off to a slow start but was only a few paces behind the leaders. Her fans knew she could soon catch up. But this time Kathy didn’t bolt to the lead as she had done before. Instead, she veered away from the other runners. Without breaking stride, she ran off the track, scaled a seven-foot fence, raced down a side street, and jumped off a 50-foot bridge. Ten minutes later, her coach found her on the concrete flood plain of the White River. She had two broken ribs, punctured a lung, and was paralyzed from the waist down. Not only would she never run again, she might never walk again.
What happened to Kathy? Why did she quit the race and nearly self-destruct? As a star athlete and pre-med student on the dean’s list, she had everything going for her. She had been valedictorian of her high school class. Teachers and coaches described her as sweet, sensible, diligent, courteous, and religious. Nobody understood her behavior. It didn’t make sense.
Kathy’s father thought the tragedy “had something to do with the pressure that is put on young people to succeed.” Teammates felt the pressure may have come from within Kathy herself. “She was a perfectionist,” said one of them. Determined to excel at everything, Kathy had studied relentlessly, even during team workouts.
How did Kathy explain her actions? She told an interviewer that she was overcome by the terrifying fear of failure as she began falling behind in the race. “All of a sudden…I just felt like something snapped inside of me.” She felt angry and persecuted. These negative reactions were new to Kathy and made her feel as if she were someone else. “I just wanted to run away,” she recalled. “I don’t see how I climbed that fence…I just don’t feel like that person was me. I know that sounds strange, but I was just out of control…I was watching everything that was happening and I couldn’t stop.”
The case of Kathy O. raises fascinating question for psychology. Personality, social, and developmental psychologists might ask how athletic ability, intelligence, parental support, competition, motivation o achieve, and personality traits combined to make Kathy a superstar in the first place. Clinical psychologists would want to know why something “snapped” inside Kathy at this race, why feelings of anger were so foreign to her, and why she felt persecuted. Those who study the nature of consciousness would try to understand Kathy’s perception that she was outside herself, unable to stop her flight toward death. Health psychologists and those who work in the area of sports psychology might try to identify signs of stress and clues in earlier behaviors that could have signaled and impending breakdown. Psychologists who emphasize the biological basis of behavior might consider the role of brain and hormonal factors in her sudden abnormal reaction.
We may never completely understand what motivated Kathy’s behavior, but psychology provides the tools – research methods – and the scaffolding – theories about causes of behavior – for exploring basic questions about who we are and why we think, feel, and act as we do. Psychologists are challenged to make some sense of cases such as this one that violate ordinary conceptions about human nature. Their motivation is not only intellectual curiosity but also a desire to discover how to help people in ways that might prevent such tragedies in the future.
From Zimbardo Psychology and Life
HarperCollins, 1992, pages 1-2