So you want to read my mind?

I perceive myself as a scientist, and as such want to study psychology. I definitely got some of my inquisitiveness from my parents. My parents are both engineers, so they love asking questions about design and function and how things work. My dad does this with machines, while my mom does it with computers; both very technical and not very personal. I want to take those values and apply them to people. One thing my mom always did for me was to help me work through end-goal questions and lessons learned so I could move forward to see my goals more clearly. She has inspired me because she is a woman working in a STEM field and makes more money than my dad, and those things surprise some people! She doesn't even realize she's blowing past societal barriers and stereotypes. She inspires me to be the scientist I want to be. Something that my extended family asks me when I tell them I want to study psychology is, "So you want to read my mind and put me in a mental institution?" They ask this jokingly, but sometimes it does reflect the true perception they have of me–that of a mind reader. I try to explain that as a psychology major, I simply want to ask the same questions of people that engineers ask of machines. How do they work? How do they make decisions? What in people, including myself, leads us to somewhere?