People sometimes fear me. Confused and intimidated, they suddenly become aware of their appearance and thoughts. They deeply regret the question that resulted in my answer which makes them feel naked. It always starts innocuously. They just want to be friendly, follow the social norms of politeness.

“What are you studying?” Followed by my answer: “Psychology”. Discomfort is immediately visible. At loss for words, they assess the danger of the situation. Finally, after painful pondering, comes the reply: “Can you read my mind then?”

This is by far not the most inappropriate prejudice the discipline of psychology is facing. Psychologists are female do-gooders who study psychology because they want to understand themselves. They spend their time torturing apes, making people fill out endless questionnaires and finding explanations for weird human behaviours. Or they get paid for giving common sense advice to people rambling about their traumatic childhood.

Last week, the British Psychological Society (BPS) celebrated its 110th anniversary. Is that a celebration of over a century of institutionalised kitchen sink wisdom?

After all, the omnipresence of psychological knowledge has mainly been achieved during the past century. Today, everyone is a psychologist, and “pop-science” might be an appropriate denomination. Hardly surprising considering you can have a proper look at the discipline’s cutting-edge research in your bathroom mirror.

Also, no need for expensive equipment or time-consuming internships, if you want to gain some first hand experience – invite a friend onto your couch and ask them how they feel.

If you now have the vague feeling that what psychologists do seems to be a bit of a joke, then that is just what I wanted.

We should value that people think they have a deep understanding of the human psyche. Many believe that psychological knowledge consists of intuitive common sense revelations. Is that a problem? I don’t think so – for two reasons:

Firstly, common knowledge is not inferior to precise, scientific knowledge. Instead, it encompasses how we adapt more complicated concepts to our daily needs. Common knowledge provides a system with the help of which we can make sense of the world around us.

Consider the example of the well-known electric shock experiment, conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1963. It showed that people obey an authority to such an extent that they are willing to administer deadly electric shocks to other humans.

The interpretations remain controversial: does it explain events such as the Holocaust? Did the experiment resemble a realistic situation? Were the participants well-chosen?

Generations of psychology students have taken the experiment apart. Many might have concluded that it is not valid and says nothing about obedience and acting against one’s moral conscience. For most people, however, that does not and should not matter.

Common knowledge ignores most aspects of the controversy and thus makes it easy to convey the message: Watch out for people in white coats, uniforms or suits – facing an authority can mess with your moral judgment.

Psychology advanced our understanding of mankind in numerous other aspects: 110 years ago people believed that women do not have the mental capacity to work outside the home; that some ethnicities are smarter than others and that homosexuality is a disease.

Without the contributions of psychology, the majority of us would probably still believe this. Not all of the answers are as undisputed as they appear – we still do not know, for example, to what extent gender differences can be attributed to nature or to nurture. What matters, though, is that they give us a guideline, and shows where future research needs to continue.

Nevertheless, psychology benefited from the technological advances of the 20th century in an unequalled way – until the 1960s, it was believed that infants could not feel pain – surgery was conducted without anesthetics. When I applied for ethical approval for my research project last year, I was asked to revise it – because the Smarties I had planned to give as treats to my participants contained artificial colouring.

The second reason why it is not a problem that psychology is often considered pop-science is simple: because it isn’t one, really.

Consider this – the BPS celebrated its 110th anniversary in October. The modern human is around 100,000 years old. The first experimental psychology lab was established in Leipzig, Germany, in 1879. Cambridge followed in 1912. The study of the human mind, one might think, is as old as mankind itself.

For millennia, however, this was a philosophical or religious problem rather than one regarded ‘worthy’ of science. This changed in the late 19th century as an aftermath of the Enlightenment. The human mind became the object of a new discipline – an undertaking both ambitious and hopeless. Results were needed: objective theories, reliable experiments and significant outcomes. Facts and figures, in other words, and not phenomena largely open to interpretation.

Have you ever had difficulties putting your feelings into words? Could you imagine describing them formally in a theoretical framework? This is what makes psychology a challenging discipline. It seems easy to find plausible explanations but the deeper we dig the more awareness we gain of the mysteriousness of the human psyche.

The human brain still carries many secrets: we do not know why we feel empathy; why blind infants can smile and how exactly we learn to speak, just to name a few.

Happy birthday, BPS. Your present shall be the unsolved mysteries of human behaviour. This should keep you busy for another 110 years.