3 minute read
Is psychology a real science?
from Psyche - Issue 1
by Psyche
Is psychology a real science?
Layla Amawi
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Marita Kimo
If you are in any way involved in the field of psychology, you’ve probably had someone make snarky jokes about it not being a “real” science. I’ve had well-intentioned friends and family ask me if I’m sure my degree is a Bachelor of Science (yes, it is). “Real” scientists indignantly describe how psychology differs from their own very real, very hard sciences, and acquaintances half-jokingly nod and remark, “sure, but it’s not a science science, is it?”.
To argue that psychology is a “real” science, the first step would be to define science. In the simplest definition of the term, science is a systematic study of the natural world through observation and experimentation. Science has colloquially been turned into a continuum, with hard sciences like physics and chemistry on one end and soft sciences like psychology and sociology on the other end. Hard sciences are said to have more controlled experiments, clearly defined terminology, and replicability. How exactly does psychology fit into this continuum?
When I started thinking about how to go about writing this article, I put my experimental psychology degree to good use and started the first step of my research: I asked 25 of my psychologist and non-psychologist friends whether they thought psychology was a real science. I specifically asked them to be brutally honest and not to think too hard about it. Answers ranged from “it’s a real science because it uses the scientific method” to “psychology is a young science, it’s still finding its feet”. Most of them also agreed that the issues psychology covers are inherently variable, but that shouldn’t lead to discounting the field as mere speculation. One explained that it’s “not not a science”, and one simply told me to “blame Freud”.
They weren’t far off. The most basic argument for psychology being a real science is the use of the scientific method: systematic observation, data collection, hypothesizing, testing hypotheses, conducting controlled experiments, analysing results and constructing theories. The issue with psychology is not the method, it’s the subject matter. Psychology does not just look at the brain as an organ, it studies the mind and cognition as well. Part of the issue with the mind is that it’s the source of creativity, imagination and abstractions; it’s quite literally a grey area. Investigating people’s thoughts and thought processes is an extremely difficult pursuit, and organising this research into a scientific system is even more difficult.
The number of variables that go into this research is immense, but psychology is developing and sorting through all of these messy variables in order to create a more concrete system of knowledge. More importantly, like other sciences, psychology seeks not only to observe, but to also understand the mechanisms behind what is observed. The human mind and consciousness are complex and current research is only starting to understand how they work. That being considered, psychology has made huge leaps in uncovering truths about consciousness and cognition and is moving towards an even more elaborate understanding of these areas.
Most people would also disregard psychology as a science because of issues with testability and quantifiability. There’s a lot of room for error when collecting data from humans, but that doesn’t make the endeavour less scientific; it just makes it harder, and academics have moved towards using more robust methods and powerful statistics to find answers in humans’ very noisy data. Quantifying and testing subjective experiences is arguably more difficult than testing concrete matters, but as is the case with other sciences, technology has helped the field with quantifying variables. Academics have been using every tool at their disposal, from fMRIs to EEGs to eye tracking, to quantify and test variables. For variables that can’t be quantified even with technology, there’s operationalisation: the creation, validation, and testing of an operational definition that will act as the substitute for an abstract concept.
Additionally, science attempts to find general rules to apply; universal equations to fit all scenarios. But you can’t apply universal formulas to humans, there are complicated cultural and individual interactions that make it that much harder to find a universal formula if one does exist. And once we acknowledge the difficulty of identifying these local conditions, the problem ceases to be with quantifying and gathering data; it becomes an issue of organising this information into a coherent, universally established system of knowledge for other psychologists to build on.
So why should we care if psychology is considered a science? Two important reasons: funding and being taken seriously. In 2012, when the U.S. House of Representatives cut funding for political science research, a Washington Post article went a step further and asked to “cut the NSF’s entire social science budget. Use half the savings for hard science and the rest to reduce the deficit.”. To cut the social science budget in the U.S.A or anywhere else would be to tell any individuals who have benefited from research in psychology that helping them is not a valid use of effort or money.
Psychology traverses into other disciplines including but not limited to epidemiology, biology, neurology, and philosophy. Disregarding psychology as a science would reduce its contributions to these fields and to our understanding of mental illness, learning disorders, and general human behaviour. This directly ties into being taken seriously as well; smirks and snide comments aren’t just irritating, they’re a direct claim of psychology’s inferiority. Research informs clinical knowledge and has applications that even the most sceptical “hard” scientists benefit from. Science is not limited to neat formulas and equations; psychology is messy, but so is the subject matter.
