Are you a psychology student? An undergraduate psychology major, perhaps, or a graduate student? If so, I suspect you have some strengths you may not even realize. As you go out into the world looking for a job or just living your life, your psychology training will be your secret weapon. Even if you’re just a casual psychology student—someone who reads blog posts, articles, and books, for example, without pursuing a formal degree—you can reap some of the same benefits from what you learn about psychology.

Reason #1: Psychology Is Your Secret Weapon: People Love It

The most important reason psychology is your secret weapon is that people love it. They’re fascinated by the latest research. They’re eager to gain a new and deeper understanding of the people around them and, of course, themselves.

If you want to get a sense of what people want to know, and what they’ll spend their time learning even when they don’t have to as part of any coursework or work commitment, look at the TED Talks they watch. TED Talks, as you probably know, can be about absolutely anything. In academic disciplines, these lectures cover everything from anthropology, architecture, and astronomy in A to zoology in Z.

Let’s take a look at the current list of the 25 most popular lectures of all time to see how many of them are about psychology. Each of the 25 lectures has been viewed millions of times.

The #1 TED lecture, and the most popular of all time, is “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” and it’s a lecture drawn from psychology.

The #2 TED lecture, “Your Body Language Can Shape Who You Are,” is a psychology lecture.

The #3 TED lecture, “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” is a psychology lecture.

The #4 TED lecture, “The Power of Vulnerability,” is a psychology lecture.

The #5 TED lecture, “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Orgasm.” There’s some psychology in it.

TED Talk 6, “How to Talk So People Want to Listen” is a psychology lecture.

TED Talk 7, “My Insight” is a psychology lecture.

TED Talk 8, “Why We Do What We Do” is a psychology lecture.

TED Talk 9, “This Is What Happens When You Respond to Spam” is a psychology lecture.

TED Talk 10, “Appearances Aren’t Everything. Trust Me, I’m a Model” is a psychology lecture.

TED Talk 11, “The Motivation Puzzle” is a psychology lecture.

TED Talk 12, “The Power of Introverts” is a psychology lecture.

TED Talk 13, “How to Spot a Liar” is a psychology lecture.

TED Talk 14, “What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from the Longest Study of Happiness,” is a psychology talk.

TED Talk 15, “The Happy Secret to Working Better,” is a psychology talk.

TED Talk 16, “The Exciting Potential of SixthSense,” includes some psychology.

TED Talk 17, “How I Hold My Breath for 17 Minutes,” includes some psychology.

TED Talk 18, “The Art of Misleading,” is a psychology talk.

TED Talk 19, “The Surprising Science of Happiness,” is a psychology talk.

TED Talk 20, “Inside the Mind of a Professional Procrastinator,” is a psychology talk.

TED Talk 21, “How to Make Stress Your Friend,” is a psychology talk.

TED Talk #22 is “Underwater Surprises.” Oh, no—this has nothing to do with psychology! But look, of the most popular TED Talks ever, the ones that could have been about anything at all, the first 21 had to do with psychology. And so do the last three of the top 25:

23 “The Magic of the Brain.”

24 “The Danger of a Single Story.”

25 “Your Elusive Creative Genius.”

This list of TED Talks is my favorite example of how people love psychology. But it’s not the only example. Psychology Today, for example, is incredibly popular, attracting millions of visitors each month.

2 Why Psychology Is Your Secret Weapon: Understanding Humans Is a Big Challenge

I have to admit that while I, and many others, love psychology, some look down on the people who study it. When I first taught a large lecture—300 students in Psychology 101—a group of pre-meds would line up in the second row of the lecture hall every day, waiting for an opportunity to pounce on me. They loved to challenge me. And they loved to bring up in their questions the fact that their other courses were in physics and chemistry—you know, the “hard” sciences.

They succeeded in shaking my confidence a little. I had never taught a large lecture before, so I felt insecure. But they didn’t shake my confidence in the value of psychology or the challenge it presented. My response was that if they wanted to study something hard, they should study psychology. Physics and chemistry—in a way, that’s the easy thing. When you study an atom or a molecule, he’s not trying to teach you back. He’s not trying to psychologically trick you. He’s not trying to impress you. He’s not trying to hide how you feel. So I told them that if they wanted a real challenge, they should try to understand other human beings.

When I was at the University of Virginia, I spent a few years on the university committee that made decisions about promotion and tenure. We took our work very seriously. To make a recommendation about whether a colleague should get tenure, we would read almost all of his or her work, even if it was in a field completely different from our own. And that’s when I realized that I was proud of psychology not only compared to the supposedly hard sciences but also compared to the humanities, like philosophy, literature, and religion. I don’t despise them. Scholars in the humanities are often beautiful writers and impressive thinkers. I always wanted to assign them their cases when I was on that committee.

But think about what a journal article looks like when it’s written by a psychology researcher. Psychology professors conduct experimental studies. They come up with hypotheses, and then they collect data to test those hypotheses. In their journal articles, there will be an introduction, where they explain what they predict and why, a methods section, where they explain how they tested their hypotheses, a results section, where they present their findings, and a discussion section, where they talk about whether they were right about their hypotheses and what it all means.

Humanities researchers don’t typically collect data the way psychology professors do. So on a hiring and promotion committee, I’d read their papers, and then when I got to the end, I’d think, Oh, they should have just written an introduction and a discussion! And then they’d go home.

The quality and impact of their study depend on the strength of the arguments they make. In psychology, you can write an amazing introduction. You can use your writing, your logic, and your wisdom to convince everyone that your hypothesis is true. But that’s not enough. You then have to go out and collect the data. And often, no matter how clever your introduction is, you’re completely wrong.

This can be frustrating, and sometimes, for me, it was. But more often than not, it was exciting. Sometimes the data told a more interesting story than I planned to tell. Real life was more interesting than my limited imagination.

3 Why Psychology Is Your Secret Weapon: You Understand More Than the Essence of Psychology—You Understand the Methods, Too

Up until now, I’ve been saying that psychology is your secret weapon because, by studying it, you learn hard things that other people would love to know. Those courses you take in personality psychology, abnormal psychology, and social psychology are full of interesting information about what makes people act the way they do.

But I think the courses that are your most powerful—and underappreciated—secret weapons are the ones that many students dread: courses in research methods and statistics.

When you learn about research methods, you’re not just learning what we know about our fellow humans and ourselves. You’re also learning how we know what we know. And when you learn how to know things, you also learn how to evaluate the different claims you hear in the media and in the conversations that go on around you in everyday life.

When I took what I had learned about research methods in psychology and applied it to the claims I had heard about married and single people, it was a revelation. It completely changed my understanding of what research says about the effects of marriage on your health and well-being. I have spent the past two decades of my life debunking common myths about marriage and single life. I would never have been able to do it without my training in research methodology.

4 Why Psychology Is Your Secret Weapon: People Don’t Just Want to Know, Sometimes They Need to Know

I used to say that people want what you have to offer as a person trained in psychology, but sometimes they also need what you have to offer.

In the early years of my career, I used to think of myself as a basic scientist—someone who studies research and theory, leaving the potential applications of my work to others. But over time, and especially after 9/11, that changed. Suddenly, the government realized that it needed people who understood the psychology of deception and bad faith. I worked as a consultant for a research organization. I’ve also given lectures and workshops to people who give lie detector tests, to people at the FBI, and to organizations like that.

Research firms, consulting firms, polling organizations—any group that wants to learn something new and wants what they learn to be reliable and valid, needs people who understand research methods and statistics.

These are just a few examples of how your psychology training can benefit others. But even if you don’t use your training in any way that’s useful to others, you benefit yourself.

5 Why Psychology Is Your Secret Weapon: You Learn to Think About People in More Complex Ways

I think that your psychology training makes you a more complex thinker, psychologically. Having taken a whole bunch of psychology courses, you think about psychological issues in more complex, less obvious ways.

I realized this when I first started studying single people and how other people perceive them. Think about this example.

In 2002, Time magazine ran a cover story about single women. “The magazine noted that ‘‘more women are rejecting marriage and embracing single life.’’ Time then asked, ‘‘Are they happy?’’ Some single women said they were happy.

This didn’t sit well with one reader of the story, who wrote to the magazine:

‘‘As long as women are moving around and fooling themselves that life is full when they are alone, they are putting their own selfish, hedonistic desires before what is best for the children and society.’’

This man was talking about single women who weren’t complaining about their single lives. They weren’t complaining. They weren’t asking for anything. They were describing what they liked about their single lives. So why was this man so upset? At first, this was confusing to me.

My first reaction was to wonder what it meant to take comments like this seriously. Because sometimes, that can be the most honest and logical approach.

So here was someone saying that single women were ‘‘putting their own selfish, hedonistic desires before what is best for the children and society.’’ If this is his problem, is there a way that single women can act to please him? Now I am certainly not saying that single women should respond to someone like him by appeasing him. My question is more of a psychological one: What does he want?

There are several possibilities, but one logical conclusion is that he wants women to have children. So perhaps if single women were raising children, he would see that they were far from hedonistic, selfish, and narcissistic.

I don’t know what this particular man thinks about single mothers, but in the same issue of Time magazine, there was a story about single women raising children without the help of a husband. Another reader wrote in to rebuke these single women. “It’s sad that it’s typical of our narcissistic age that so many women choose to have children and raise them ‘alone.’”

So it didn’t matter if women were single and didn’t have children, or if they were single and had children. No matter what they did, other people were after them. They weren’t being humiliated for having children or anything else—they were being criticized for being single.

As I continued to study how other people thought about single people, I found the same kinds of things over and over again. For example, single women are sometimes told that their lives are empty because they don’t have a husband. They may be especially at risk of hearing this if they work in a job that doesn’t bring them fulfillment. But that’s the thing. When single women work in jobs that they love, jobs that are meaningful and make a difference in the lives of others, jobs that single women do with passion, it means they’re going to meet the same fate. They’re told that their jobs won’t love them in the first place. The opposite.

Or consider what happens to single women when it comes to sex. If single women are having sex, there are certainly people waiting to pounce on them and call them sluts. But what if they aren’t having sex? There’s also a kind of contempt for these women: “Poor thing – you’re not getting anything.”

Again, the crime isn’t whether or not you’re having sex, or even how much you’re having. The problem is that you’re single, and even in this 21st century, which is open-minded about all sorts of things, a lot of people still have a problem with people living single.

Of course, it’s not just single women who are being battered by the stereotypes, stigmas, and discrimination that I call “singleness.” Men are, too.

One of the most common stereotypes about single men is that they’re dirty. They dress like dirt, live like dirt, and talk like dirt. But what happens when people meet single men who are the exact opposite—men who always look great, have nice, attractive places, and are eloquent? That’s an easy question. If you’re a single man like that, other people will simply say, “Oh, he’s gay!” and think there’s something wrong with that. When I wrote Singled Out, I came up with chapter titles that made fun of the way other people think about single people—the myths about what single people are. And for the chapters about single men and women, I wrote titles that focused on this dilemma that no matter what you do, you’re going to be offended.

The chapter on myths about single men was titled:

“You’re lustful, dirty, irresponsible, and a creepy criminal. Or you’re sexy, demanding, frivolous, and gay.”

The chapter on myths about single women was titled:

“Your work won’t love you and your eggs will dry up. Also, you won’t get any eggs and you’re a pervert.”

For the other chapter titles, I also poked fun at myths about single people, but without the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” theme.

Myth #3: The Dark Aura of Singleness.

“You’re miserable and lonely and your life is a tragedy.”

Myth #4: It’s all about you.

“Like a child, you’re selfish and immature and your time is worth nothing because you have nothing to do but play.”

Myth #7: Attention, Single Parents:

“Your children are doomed to failure.”

Myth #8: It’s a shame you’re incomplete

“You have no one and you have no life.”

Myth #9: Poor girl

“You’ll grow old alone and die in a room where no one will find you for weeks.”

Myth #10: Family Values

“Let’s give all the perks and benefits and gifts and cash to husbands and call it family values.”

Let’s go back to the guy who wrote to Time magazine complaining about single women “who wander around fooling themselves that life is full.” Ask someone who’s never taken a psychology course to explain what happened to this guy, and he’ll probably say, “He’s an idiot!”

And you know what? He’s probably an idiot.

But that’s just one element of the psychology that categorizes and stigmatizes single people. What you learn in psychology courses is to look at the bigger picture.

When it’s not just one man attacking single people, but many men (and women too), there’s something bigger going on. When single people are offended no matter what they do, we’re talking about something more psychologically significant than people acting like idiots.

There’s something about these beliefs that people have about single people that’s very powerful. I think these beliefs are part of a whole worldview, an ideology, that people invest a lot in.

This ideology goes like this: Find the “right person,” get married, and all your dreams will come true. Your life will be set in stone. You will be happier because you’re married. You will be healthier. You will live longer. You will be a better person, perhaps morally superior to people who remain single.

This worldview is very seductive. It tells you that once you get married, your whole life will fall into place. Your fairy tales will come true.

People who believe in this worldview want it to be true. They want it to be true in the same way that people want their political ideology to be true. And that’s important to them.

The flip side of the belief that marriage will make you happier is that you won’t be happy if you’re single. This ideology says that to be truly happy, you have to get married.

And I think that’s the solution to the Time reader’s puzzle. He wasn’t angry at these single women even though they were happy—he was angry because they were happy!

That was my guess when I wrote Singled Out. Since then, there have been numerous studies to support this interpretation.

Without my training in psychology, I’m not sure I would have developed this understanding. I think I’d still say the guy who wrote to Time was just an idiot.

6 Why Psychology Is Your Secret Weapon: It Can Make Insults Seem Less Hurtful

The kinds of understanding you gain from studying psychology can be comforting if you let them. I’m someone who has said a lot of things people don’t want to hear. And I have a Twitter account. In these days of social media ridicule, I’ve been told many times that I’m just strutting around and fooling myself into thinking I’m happily single. And worse. In the spirit of Jimmy Kimmel’s snarky tweets, I’ll share a few of them, though they’re mostly comments on blog posts rather than tweets:

“You’re bitter.”

“You’re a loser.”

“No one will ever want to marry you—not because of all the tea in China.” (This made me laugh—someone thought the best way to hurt me was to say that no one would ever want to marry me.)

Another comment was so rude, that I won’t go into it in detail.

Psychology can be my secret weapon in these circumstances. I can tell myself that maybe these hateful comments aren’t really about me. Maybe they’re about the person making them, like the guy who wrote for Time magazine. He feels threatened. And he feels threatened especially because I’m a happy single person.

Now, maybe those people are right that I’m a loser and just making excuses. But knowing that I have some psychological studies to my credit is something I love.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my career in psychology while writing this. It reminds me that spending my career in psychology was not only comfortable but fun.

My wish for you is that you can get as much enjoyment out of your knowledge of psychology as I did from mine. And as secret weapons, they’re pretty damn good.