Throughout its history, psychology has suffered an identity crisis. What is it? Definitions vary, partly because textbook authors need to avoid plagiarizing each other's glossaries, but also because psychologists differ in our views on what psychology ought to study, and what it should even be.
Radical behaviorists, such as John Watson, felt it should only study objectively measurable actions; others prefer to emphasize the mental processes Watson tried to ignore, and depth psychologists such as psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud sought to understand the unconscious processes underlying it all. Among their many points of disagreement, Watson and Freud differed on the degree to which they valued the empirical method.
Freud did not trust it, and those of us trained to define psychology as an empirical science may suffer more than a little cognitive dissonance over the field's reproducibility crisis, a.k.a. psychology's replication crisis. Laboratory after laboratory has failed to reproduce the findings obtained in numerous classical studies, especially in personality and social psychology. Regardless of the reasons why they have failed to replicate an alarming number of studies, that problem has, in turn, cultivated a crisis of confidence both internally within the field and externally in terms of public perception (Ferguson, 2015).
The fact that most layfolk do not understand what psychology is does not help the issue. Within psychology, our points of disagreement over the definition are based largely upon specific points of view, interpretation of facts, preferences in methodology, and professional experience. In other words, our disagreements over the definition are at least based on our understanding of it as professionals.
Many people largely misunderstand psychology or understand only a sliver of what it is all about. In his examination of public perception of psychology, Scott Lilienfeld (2012) argued that the problem with how the field is perceived arises from both public misconceptions and psychologists' failure to show the public that pop psychology does not represent most of psychology or that questionable therapeutic practices are overrepresented in the public eye.
If you tell the average person that you are a psychologist, you will often get an answer to the effect of (a) "I (or someone I know) could use your help," or (b) "You're probably studying us right now." While statement (a) tends to be broached in the form of a joke, it can be very serious. Please do not assume every therapist is any more ready to counsel for free than your plumber wants to check out your kitchen pipes for the fun of it in the middle of a party. A concerned professional encountering someone in an everyday situation may well have a conflict of interest because of whatever circumstances have brought them together, although admittedly the therapist might help point such individuals toward the help they need.
As for (b), we are almost certainly not studying you during a random conversation. Studying people all the time wears a person out. Both types of statements, especially the first, reflect popular notions and misconceptions, such as the idea that psychologists are all therapists. Half of us are not. So the assumption that a psychologist works in a clinical/counseling area stands no better than a coin toss chance of being right.
The complex nature of psychology makes it sound unscientific to many people. If we cannot prove our hypotheses as clearly as adding two hydrogen atoms to one oxygen atom will make a water molecule, how can we call our area scientific? Psychology is arguably the hardest of the soft sciences. The "hard" in hard science refers to the concreteness of whatever it is studying, but the causality to actions or mental processes is so complicated and involves too many influencing factors to measure them all, that the subject matter seems abstract. If the population's critical thinking skills grow weaker, people, in general, will have even more difficulty understanding that certainty does not correlate with accuracy, and should not correlate with the level of confidence that the more certain person will inspire in others.
THE BASICSWe need to use jargon, we need to write in APA style, and we need to understand statistics. When we are trying to convey psychological concepts to others, though, we need to remember that they do not use our jargon, they are not accustomed to reading things written in APA style, and they may roll their eyes when we start throwing out numbers. We need to communicate in a language that people know.
Even those who are very smart may have difficulty following your point or simply staying interested when you start lecturing at them in everyday life. If you do not know handtools well, you may not want your plumber to assume you know the difference between a hand auger and a borescope, nor should that plumber to throw out too many unfamiliar tool terms and expect you to keep them straight over the course of a discussion you are genuinely trying to have with that professional regarding your household plumbing.
Confidence Essential Reads
The Confidence Code: 3 Ways to Project (and Attain) Success 
15 Ways to Build Your Confidence Or if you know your tools, you might not know the nicknames applied to them by pros who use them on a daily basis any more than your great-uncle will know the "Big Five" refers to the OCEAN five-factor model of personality (McCrae & Costa, 1987) instead of some ranking of football teams. And seriously reconsider inserting a parenthetical reference like that last one (you know, McCrae & Costa, 1987) when you're writing to a general audience full of people who have not been trained in APA style and are, thus, unaccustomed to that kind of visual or auditory speed bump.
Social psychologist Phil Zimbardo teaches psychology in relatable terms (Discovering Psychology). Source: Original screen capture, Travis Langley. A number of television producers I have spoken with have mentioned that network executives are wary of the word psychology because it can intimidate the public. Whether they are right about that or not, their perception probably exists for some good reason, and they make the production and programming decisions. Except for an obviously academic program, such as Phil Zimbardo's Discovering Psychology, psychological TV series shy away from that word in their titles (e.g., Brain Games, The Mind Explained).
Sometimes we have to educate people without letting them know that is what we are doing. Sometimes we must teach in parables and use other indirect means to get our points across. Mostly though, many professionals in the study of human nature (and, frankly, any area of education) need to do a better job of understanding human nature ourselves, to get better at considering the audience's point of view in order to realize what they need to hear.
Some may find it all too easy to dismiss a psychologist who appears on talk shows, talking in common language while spouting his or her own intuition and whatever seems like common sense under the veneer of the "Dr." name, but that kind of psychologist does speak to many people. Those who want the public to learn what psychology really is may need to a few lessons of a different kind from the kind of pop psychologist who reaches the masses somehow, while still managing to avoid its pitfalls.