Who said psychology should not be a science

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This rich combination of qualitative and quantitative skills makes psychology a good undergraduate degree that can prepare students for a wide array of careers.

This advanced education in psychology often involves a strengthening of research skills, and an increased focus on the scientific method and the design of research studies, according to Dominello. Is psychology a science?

The short answer is yes, but the long answer is much more expansive and flexible. Psychology begins with the scientific method, and researchers employ many of the same methods as their colleagues in the natural and physical sciences, but psychology also calls for a deep understanding of human behavior that goes beyond science alone.

Pete Davies is a marketing and communications director in higher education. Follow him on Twitter daviespete or connect on LinkedIn. To become a licensed social worker, you need to get licensed in the state in which you intend to practice. Common sense, then, is something which everybody uses in their day-to-day lives, guides decisions and influences how we interact with one another.

But because it is not based on systematic evidence, or derived from scientific inquiry, it may be misleading and lead to one group of people treating others unfairly and in a discriminatory way. Despite having a scientific methodology worked out we think , there are further problems and arguments which throw doubt onto psychology ever really being a science. Limitations may refer to the subject matter e.

Science assumes that there are laws of human behavior that apply to each person. Therefore science takes both a deterministic and reductionist approach.

Science studies overt behavior because overt behavior is objectively observable and can be measured, allowing different psychologists to record behavior and agree on what has been observed. This means that evidence can be collected to test a theory about people.

Scientific laws are generalizable, but psychological explanations are often restricted to specific times and places. Because psychology studies mostly people, it studies indirectly the effects of social and cultural changes on behavior.

Psychology does not go on in a social vacuum. These factors, and individual differences, make research findings reliable for a limited time only. Are traditional scientific methods appropriate for studying human behavior? When psychologists operationalize their IV, it is highly likely that this is reductionist, mechanistic, subjective, or just wrong.

Experiments are keen to establish that X causes Y, but taking this deterministic view means that we ignore extraneous variables, and the fact that at a different time, in a different place, we probably would not be influenced by X.

There are so many variables that influence human behavior that it is impossible to control them effectively. The issue of ecological validity ties in really nicely here. Objectivity is impossible. It is a huge problem in psychology, as it involves humans studying humans, and it is very difficult to study the behavior of people in an unbiased fashion.

Moreover, in terms of a general philosophy of science, we find it hard to be objective because we are influenced by a theoretical standpoint Freud is a good example of this. The observer and the observed are members of the same species are this creates problems of reflectivity. A behaviorist would never examine a phobia and think in terms of unconscious conflict as a cause, just like Freud would never explain it as a behavior acquired through operant conditioning.

This particular viewpoint that a scientist has is called a paradigm Kuhn, Kuhn argues that most scientific disciplines have one predominant paradigm that the vast majority of scientists subscribe to. Anything with several paradigms e. With a myriad of paradigms within psychology, it is not the case that we have any universal laws of human behavior, and Kuhn would most definitely argue that psychology is not a science. Verification i. It could be disproved at any moment. The main driving force behind this particular grumble is Karl Popper, the famous philosopher of science and advocator of falsificationism.

Take the famous Popperian example hypothesis: "All swans are white". Or consider non-linear dynamics where dependence on initial conditions is so extreme that systems like weather and biological populations become completely chaotic after a while. And yet you can apply statistics to these systems, make more or less reliable predictions and call it science.

Which brings us to Berezow's last two points. Testability and prediction are indeed two cornerstones of science. I have already indicated that testability can often be accurate enough to be useful. As for prediction, firstly it can lie within a window of applicability. In my own field we routinely predict the activity or lack thereof of novel drug molecules. And all this is still science.

But more importantly, prediction is not actually as important to science as Berezow thinks. The physicist David Deutsch has noted that after watching a magician perform a magic trick ten times you would be able to predict what he would do next, but it doesn't mean at all that you have actually understood what the magician is doing. Contrary to popular belief, in science understanding is at least as or more important than prediction. And psychological studies have definitely provided some understanding of how human beings behave under certain circumstances.

It has helped us understand questions like: Why do smart people believe weird things? Why do otherwise decent people turn into monsters under certain circumstances the banality of evil? What is the basis of the bystander effect in which empathetic people don't come forward to stop a crime?

Psychology has provided intriguing clues and explanations in all these areas, even if those explanations are not one-hundred percent reproducible and quantifiable. Is this science? Well, it's not a science like physics, but why should physics be the yardstick for measuring the "sciencyness" of various fields? At the same time, I agree with Berezow that science cannot be redefined to such an extent that it no longer obeys time-honored criteria like testability and reproducibility; if you gradually start relaxing foundational requirements like hypothesis testing and observation you quickly slide down a slippery slope, at the bottom of which lie creatures like creationism, the Piltdown Man and astrology.

But this was also the case with the beginnings of modern science when data collection was dominant, explanations were few and nobody had any idea what hypothesis testing meant. Yet we call what Linnaeus was doing science, and we call what Brahe was doing science. For crying out loud, even some of the work done by alchemists classifies as science; they did refine processes like distillation and sublimation after all.

In my view psychology is in what we might call the Linnaean stage, collecting and classifying data and trying to find the right theory for describing its complexities. To me the acrimonious debates about evolutionary and positive psychology reflect the trial-by-fire that every field goes through in its early days to separate the chaff from the wheat. If you apply a narrow-minded definition of science then it might indeed be hard to call psychology a science.

But what matters is whether it's useful.