I think that is what may be at work with 'common sense' psychology. The average person will overcome the need for 'psychological treatment', eventually, quite regardless of whether they actually receive professional care or not. So, like snake bite, any 'common sense' theory about psychology will seem to work. And, of course, no belief is more firmly held than one confirmed by experience.

I am not just picking at semantics because of the name of my own blog, but (like you) I want to understand the true essence of that phrase.

Psychologists, like all specialists, would obviously disagree that their profession is just common sense. But the difference is that, whereas people don't usually claim that electronics or architecture is common sense, they do think that they understand psychology because so much of normal conversation IS pop psychology. Why did he do that? What did she really mean? That's everyday talk.

The key difference is that the common person suggests a specific answer to a particular case, the psychologist looks for a general pattern that is applicable to other situations, i.e. being useful instead of inane, making behaviour into science.

Not to say that there is no value in hunches - after all, the first thing you have to do is think of a good hypothesis worth testing. A lot of bad hypotheses are (ideally) rejected right out of the gate, and I think a lot of that is fairly intuitive. Although whether that's "blind" intuition or an innate sense honed through study and practice, I don't know...

I think the biggest problem with the common-sense approach actually arises from two separate difficulties: one is our inability to understand our own thought processes, as you've covered recently; the other is our tendency to assume that everyone thinks the same way that we do. How easy is it, when you hear some psychological tidbit that matches your own personality perfectly, to say, "that's just common sense?"

BTW, yes - common sense = folk psychology. Just trying to avoid the jargon.

Sociology is huge and fractured (the supreme postmodern discipline), but from my position within it, I'd say this is like the distinction between "folk theory" and "social theory" that many of us make. All people develop theories about how and why their society/culture works as it does; this enables them to successfully navigate their social interactions. When their folk theories are "wrong", it's because they don't work in that particular social setting. Often, folk theories can be correct in a more scientific sense as well, but it isn't their function to be scientifically true—their function is to enable the individual and group to successfully interact.

This seems to map onto your notion of "common sense", or what I would call "folk psychology". Of course people have an experiential understanding of their own psychologies, or at least of the psychology as it manifests in their cultural setting. And of course it's wrong (or counter-intuitive) some of the time. The purpose of a folk psychology is to, again, enable the individual to explain and/or understand herself and others, and to be able to interact with them successfully.

I'm not sure why this would cause psychologists to become defensive or their heads to explode. This is part of the fun puzzle of studying in the social sciences writ large, isn't it? Why do our brains develop "good enough" theories, but not factually correct ones? Why do factually incorrect theories "work" for people who hold them? Why does scientific inquiry require us to suspend our own folk theories (folk social theory, folk psychology, folk biology, and folk physics) in order to do our work? This is all, for me, one of the funnest parts of doing the work I do.