Psychology as a Science

[beta1607]

My girlfriend was a psych major at UCLA while I was Political Science and we have an on going argument as to what degree psychology is a science.

I think that it is not of the same distinction as biology, physics, math or chemisty based upon facts and theroms - but rather more along the lines of a discipline like economics or political science that is constantly evolving and there can be many "right" answers to a specific problem. She believes it is closer to a hard science.

I would love to hear some opinions on this from you all.

[toots]

PhD in Clinical Psychology.

All through my graduate career, my faculty and advisors kept trying to convince me that psychology is a science. Only problem is that before I got into psychology, I studied real sciences like chemistry and physics. I felt that my faculty and advisors were consistently full of crap on this point.

For some reason, they awarded me the degree anyway.

I had a decade of undergrad and grad years where they tried to beat into me that it's a science. I still don't buy it.

It's not that I don't consider Psychology to be important. It's extremely important. It's just that trying to shoehorn it into the category of "science" only diminishes both.

[IShark]

Neither. You're both wankers.

[Al Schoonmaker]

Psychology is not remotely as "hard" a science as chemistry, physics, etc., and I doubt that it ever will become that hard. However, it is considerably more scientific than it once was, and every year it gets a bit more scientific.

Some areas, such a neuropsychology, are almost as scientific as various other medical fields. Learning theory is quite scientific, and many principles are well known and widely accepted.

Psychotherapy is still very "soft." We really know very little about what works and why.

In order for psychology to continue to develop, we have to much more rigorous in our thinking and methods. At the moment our data are often so ambiguous that extremely inconsistent conclusions can be drawn. And, of course, we draw the conclusions that fit our our prejudices.

Regards,

Al

[PokerProdigy]

My psychology teacher actually predicted today that in about 40 years psychology and biology will be very close/related, and that they'll be very similar except they each have a little bit of a difference in their main area of study. Some people even argue that psychology is already a "hard science." Personally I (who am a psychology and economics major) see it more of a social science.

[toots]

No, I'll actually disagree with that.

Psychology often assumes that rigor will somehow be a substitute for actual scientific validity, to the point where they're infinitely rigorous about total conjecture. In fact, if Psychology really were scientific, its findings would be more easily provable/reproducible, and ultimately require less rigor.

I mean, it doesn't take a heck of a lot of rigor to demonstrate gravity. It doesn't take a heck of a lot of rigor to demonstrate an exothermic reaction. But, so much of what's published in psychological journals is conjecture based on measured behavior that yields and infintessimally small effect, but since they picked a big enough sample size, they get all giddy over a really great P value.

The particular clinical program I went to (UConn) really prized rigorous scientific method, and the more they did, the more hollow the results ended up looking.

You're right: Psychotherapy isn't scientific, nor should it be. You can find an actual strong correlation between behaviors that describe a lot of people, but it still doesn't tell you a thing about the next patient to walk through the door.

Human behavior has a nearly infinite capacity for irrationality, illogic and impulsiveness, and things like happiness or contentedness stem not from logical deduction, but emotional balance. Trying to express that as a science, as I said, just dimishes both psychology and science.