People are frequently surprised when I refer to psychology as science. This surprise reveals some common misconceptions about what “science” and “psychology” mean. I am piecing together this post out of snippets of two old rants in order to address those misconceptions for future reference.
In a recent essay which is very pertinent to this topic, I wrote:
“science” refers to a particular way of arriving at conclusions—the application of the scientific method to testable phenomena. It is not limited to particular academic disciplines (biology, chemistry, physics), but it specifically excludes claims which merely adopt the label of “science.”
The speed of light in a vacuum was determined through documented scientific experimentation. So was the molar mass of hydrogen. Psychology uses the same basic methods. The ideas studied in psychology are much harder to pinpoint and the science has not advanced to the same stage of precision as physics and chemistry, but it is science by any complete definition of the word.
Even theories like the theory of gravity, which seem easy to test experimentally, have their parts which are more complicated to test. How do we know that it is something inherent to the mass of an object which causes its attraction to other objects? Before humans went into space, all gravitational fields that we could measure with our hands and eyes were basically swamped by the huge gravitational field of the earth. But there was still very good evidence to support the basic theory, in the form of experiments on earth as well as direct observations of the movements of celestial bodies.
Psychopathology has historically been one of the branches of psychology more likely to diverge from science into arbitrary theorizing. But psychopathology is not a representation of psychology as a whole, nor should those individual reports in psychopathology which fail at science be taken for more than they are. There exist better ones which use more rigorous methods for gathering data and drawing conclusions.
The assumption that psychology is not science derives from a broad (and meaningless) image of science as “that which involves test tubes and chemicals.” This image gives disproportionate credibility to scientists who happen to have used a chemical in an experiment. For example, social psych experiments which test for cortisol in saliva might be seen as more “scientific” than other experiments even if the cortisol measurements don’t provide any useful data. Judging “science” based on whether it sounds like one of the “big three” (biology, chemistry, physics) is arbitrary and limiting.
When many people hear the word “psychology,” they think “Freud.” Freud was not a scientist. He was a storyteller. He also has zero credibility in modern psychology, except for a in few subsets of psychoanalysis, which shouldn’t even be called “psychology,” since they don’t really “study” the mind, they intuit about it, as Freud himself did.
Psychology encompasses the study of many patterns of human thought and behavior outside of pathology, and such study meets every definition of science that things like neuroscience and biology meet, even if it does not involve directly observing neural responses. For example, cognitive researchers have conducted experiments on the conditions under which people’s memories perform better. Memory outcomes can be tested without fMRI or PET scans. In fact, behavioral measures of memory are currently better than vague attempts to pinpoint memory structures in the brain itself. Another example: I help conduct experiments on implicit race stereotypes involving a measurement system called the Implicit Association Test. Experimental manipulations involving exposure to race-related primes can affect the speed at which people are able to categorize subsequent stimuli. We arrive at these conclusions by conducting controlled experiments on large numbers of people and measuring their results—exactly the same scientific methods used by neurobiology researchers who examine differences in fMR images based on exposure to similar primes, or pain, or social rejection, or whatever else.
Tags: case studies, chemical, experimentation, fMRI, Freud, misconceptions, natural science, neuroscience, pathology, PET, psychoanalysis, psychology, psychopathology, science, scientific method, social science
