Is Psychology a science:

A science: systematically observing natural events, then using those observations to develop laws
and principles, then those principles are tested through scientific method.

Psychology study of thr human mind and behaviour, lots of different ways to do that
- Research does follow scientific methos like bio or chem
- Normally create a testable hypothesis on why that behaviour happens

People who don’t believe psychology is a science will usually say that psychology isn’t
rigorous enough -- that data is often inconclusive or can be interpreted in too many ways.
They might also argue that the definitions in psychology are too abstract to be accurately
tested.

Eg, how can you define abstract concepts like happiness or anger.
People describe it differently based on thei culture, backround and experience, it cannot be quantified or
be objectovey measured as it is so abstract

Realiability bcoz cant repeat experiments since people change, and people cannot be controlled like a
objective variable.

Counter claims

- Data inclonclusive or can be interpreted in many ways

Since cant deinfe abstract concepts like happiness or anger, its hard
but psychologists account for those things.
Like, even though you can’t directly measure abstract concepts like happiness or anger,
psychologists operationalize them — meaning, they create, validate, and test a functional
definition that serves as a good substitute for something abstract.

Psychologists can't use a ruler or a microscope, so they invent an

Psychology is not looking to capture a universal experience- that’s not possible – humans messy-
influcned by many things from culture to circumstance, it is used to create a generale understanding and
hypothesis behind human behaviour which can be applied to many real life situations

study of the human mind is often missing the tightly-controlled experimental conditions
and conclusive results that you’ll find in other fields, like astronomy or chemistry.

Correlation – fiel experiment – psychologists carefully observe ubjects in normal, controlled

Use statistics to analyse relationships in this data and make sure findings are reliable,
experiments often repeated

So as long as researchers acknowledge that their work is limited by the differences between
people and take that into account in their analyses and conclusions, it’s not an issue.

Has lots of pseudo science, self help books + websites + blogs ect make false claims about
psychology, this gives rise to misinformation, discrediting a lot of the concepts in
physchology, making counter claims plausible. Hard to separate fact from fiction.

WHY SCIENCE:
- RESEARCH BASED SUBJECT WITH SCIENCE BASED INVESTIGATION
- USES SCIENTIFIC METHOD
- CARRIED OUT THROUGH GENUINE EXPERIMENTATION |9MANIPULATION OF IV)
- HAS THEORIES WHICH GENERATE HYPOTHESIS, TESTED IMPERICALLY

Advantages:
- Is objective and doesn’t taje into account subjective ipinipnsonly looks at facts
- Reliable, procedures have high levels of control
- Highly controlled, iv isolated, no extrenouse variables, allows us to measure iv on
dv… makes it credible (testing cause and effect)
- Creates lots of quantitative data, easy to anayse and compare with other data
- We do not fit into khun paradigms but as individual differences, to further
physchologies progression as a science, embrace idea of multi paradigms, lok at each
school of physchology and further their progression as a science, thus aking
physchology over all more scientific according to khun criteria

AGAINST:
- CANT BE IVESTIGATED IN SAME WAY, BIAS
- Subject matter is humans people often aware being investigated – can alter their
behavirou through demand charactersistcs
- Mind, not open to genuine scientific and impericle research, bczo it is not
observable, guess infer whats happening rather than gathering impricial data
- No fixed framekwork, in the state of pre science, young subject

Weakness:
- often highly. Controlled situation Is artificial, no reflecting a persons natural
envuronmeny, ,, low in ecological validity, thus careful to aplying results to real life –
ncould be demand characteristics social desirbilityy bias
 - could be regared as reductionist, deterministic simplifies complex human behavirour
down to small factors rather than looking at wider context. behaviors and generlises,
assumes everyones behavirour follows same pattersn
- no qualitative data collected when using scientific methos, hard to understand cause
and effect cox do not understand reason behind behavurour
- very hard to know whether observations being interpreted are impartial and
unboased

Why can we definitively say that (psychology is not a science)? Because

I have already talked about the first two criteria and indicated that lack of
clear terminology and quantifiability does not automatically consign a field
to the bin of pseudoscience. The third criterion is actually interesting and
important and it's not completely clear how to get around it. Since human
beings are not electrons, it's indeed very hard to do an experiment with
them and get the exact same results every single time. But that is why
psychology relies heavily on statistics, to determine precisely whether the
variability in results are due to chance or whether they reflect a real
difference between samples. Admittedly this is a limitation that psychology
will always have, but again, that does not mean it will preclude it from ever
being useful. That's because as Melanie accurately notes, even fields like
particle physics rely heavily on statistics these days. Nobody observed the
Higgs boson directly, it was only visible through the agency of complex tests
of statistical significance. And yet particle physics has always been regarded
as the "purest" science, even by other physicists.

kharl popper:
what makes something scientific is not that it's true but that in principle it's falsifiable
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