Is Psychology science? Reflections and thoughts.

[Fire Fly]

For some time now, this semester, I have been enrolled in an introductory psychology class. I took the class because I wanted to get a different view on behavior, since I study neurogenetics. Now, I only view behavior in the sense that genes control proteins which make certain receptors (i.e. chemoreceptor) which allows us to detect our physical environment. My first two weeks in psychology, boy was I in for a surprise. Much of the course material and the basic principles behind psychology, especially Freud, were based on such weak evidence that I could not really fathom how any other professional scientist could honestly write such things. Below are random criticisms that I have, in regards to psychology.

Freud, perhaps the most revered psychologist, has been debunked over and over yet his work is held up to such high esteem because "he was the first." Let us look at how other fields would view this. Taking biology as an example, since in its early days, it was full of pseudoscience to the left and to the right. There were many people who tried to understand why life was so complex and how there were so many variations on what seemed to be the same animal. There were many people who proposed theories that were "almost" right yet do we really ever hear of such people again, contrary to psychology? Lamarck, Burnett, Lyell and dozens more put forward theories to explain how the complexities of life came to be yet they were all wrong, despite being "pretty close;" only Darwin got it right. The last time I ever heard of Lamarck was in my 11th grade biology class back in high school when we were discussing the history of evolutionary thought.

Unlike hard science, psychology just loves all of the early psychologists because they were the first, despite their work being based on weak evidence: Freud, Watson, Piaget. Why am I learning about said person's theory if his work has been debunked? There was an entire lecture devoted to Piaget's work, despite it now known to be wrong. Again, there was an entire lecture devoted to Freud, despite his ideas having been debunked. Any self respecting science professor would hardly spend such lengthy time discussing debunked theories.

Akin to the above, psychology has no real understanding of their field. So much of what is put forth in psychology class is based on models and theories. There are several models for how memory works, several models for child development, several models for intelligence, several theories on motivation and dozens more theories. Which one is correct? The entire class seems to discuss half a dozen theories on a particular subject. How many theories are there on the origin of life? How many theories are there on the most basic nature of matter? How many theories are there on light? In a true science class, theories which have not been supported by overwhelming evidence is hardly ever taught. Do we ever hear of string theory or my lab boss' theory on sensory integration? One needs to only compare an introductory physics/biology/chemistry class and then compare a psychology class and you can easily see the distinction in what is known and what is not known.

Now, I don't really have a problem with psychology in general. I do think that studying humans is a legitimate academic field but to call psychology science is not legitimate. True science is more than just using the scientific method. It must be objective and cold, something that strongly differentiates psychology and true science.

And as a humorous side note, I knew two people who wanted to do science. One girl could not get pass organic chemistry and decided to do sociology. The other wanted to do medicine but couldn't do physics and chemistry and went into psychology.

[Uraniun235]

Why am I learning about said person's theory if his work has been debunked?

From the two psychology courses I took, it seemed to me that Freud's work was still being used to some extent by some therapists, and was even (if I remember right - wasn't the most thrilling of classes) experiencing something of a 'revival'.

Is your psychology instructor really saying that Freud has been "debunked"? Stop for a moment and consider the fact that there are those in psychology who still think that Freud's work is, at least to some degree, valid.

Now, I only view behavior in the sense that genes control proteins which make certain receptors (i.e. chemoreceptor) which allows us to detect our physical environment.

I don't necessarily subscribe to Freud or any particular psychologist, but you don't think that life experiences can contribute anything to the formation and development of a personality?

[Fire Fly]

Why am I learning about said person's theory if his work has been debunked?

From the two psychology courses I took, it seemed to me that Freud's work was still being used to some extent by some therapists, and was even (if I remember right - wasn't the most thrilling of classes) experiencing something of a 'revival'.

Is your psychology instructor really saying that Freud has been "debunked"? Stop for a moment and consider the fact that there are those in psychology who still think that Freud's work is, at least to some degree, valid.

Bohr's model of the atom is, to some degree, valid. How often is it taught? Its mentioned briefly and then you move on to a more accurate description. Emphasis should not be placed on things which are, to a degree, valid.

Now, I only view behavior in the sense that genes control proteins which make certain receptors (i.e. chemoreceptor) which allows us to detect our physical environment.

I don't necessarily subscribe to Freud or any particular psychologist, but you don't think that life experiences can contribute anything to the formation and development of a personality?[/quote]

Of course life experience contributes to shaping a personality. Life experience is simply stored sensory information.

[Pick]

A lot of it is historical context. We get that in all science classes I've taken, (chemistry, biology, geology, physics.) Usually you get some understanding of the process of getting where we are in order to get a more secure vantage for why the current stuff is really the culmination of all work in a given area. If it persists into your actual research methods classes, that'd be odd. However, remember, a lot of 100-level courses are intended for the casual student as well as those who might actually wish to major, so they include auxiliary material to flesh out the true applicative worth of a course.

I'm not saying this is correct or good, just my experience.

[Uraniun235]

Bohr's model of the atom is, to some degree, valid. How often is it taught? Its mentioned briefly and then you move on to a more accurate description. Emphasis should not be placed on things which are, to a degree, valid.

Bohr's model isn't still seriously used by some scientists in their work; it's just historical trivia. But Freud's model is still used by some psychologists. I'm not saying it's right, but I'm saying that that's why you're getting so much instruction on the topic; it's preparation for the possibility that some of the budding psychologists in the class may choose to subscribe to Freud's ideas.

So, no, I'm inclined to think that most psychology is not science at all.

[Ford Prefect]

Freud, perhaps the most revered psychologist, has been debunked over and over yet his work is held up to such high esteem because "he was the first."

It might just be your course - when I took psychology last year, the only information we got about Freud was that he was historically significant, but that his theories were no longer very strongly supported.

And as a humorous side note, I knew two people who wanted to do science. One girl could not get pass organic chemistry and decided to do sociology. The other wanted to do medicine but couldn't do physics and chemistry and went into psychology.

I wanted to do psychology this year, but could not. On the other hand, I could have chosen to do physics, engineering or chemistry. I think that's humorous.

[Academia Nut]

Actually, I feel the need to point out the fact that the Bohr model, while incorrect, still makes some rather useful predictions and it is still used in situations when breaking out Shroedinger's equations would be a pain in the ass, because, like Newton's Laws, despite being incorrect, it wasn't just something some guy pulled out of thin air but had rigorous testing done. Which is the difference between the hard sciences and something like psychology, in that in the hard sciences even the "wrong" theories are often mostly right, whereas in psychology and sociology it seems like half the time they can't even agree on the definition of the words.

[Darth Wong]

Even when "hard science" theories are disproven, they are still generally quite accurate. Someone just comes along with an even more accurate theory, or one that works better in exotic situations. That's why 99% of engineering is still done with good ol' Newtonian physics.

Psychology theories, however, have the dubious distinction of often being shown to be completely without merit or usefulness. Take the "penis envy" theory, for example. How was it ever taken seriously in the first place, if psychology is supposed to be a science? It had no justification other than Freud's say-so, for fuck's sake.

[fgalkin]

You have to understand, though, that psychology is a very new discipline. So, the older generation of psychologists was still taught a lot of the stuff that has now been debunked, hence why that bullshit is still being perpetuated.

As for Freud, he was to psychology what alchemy was to chemistry. But because most of the people teaching right now were taught it (by the people who actually believed it to be true), they still emphasize it.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Darth Wong]

You have to understand, though, that psychology is a very new discipline. So, the older generation of psychologists was still taught a lot of the stuff that has now been debunked, hence why that bullshit is still being perpetuated.

As for Freud, he was to psychology what alchemy was to chemistry. But because most of the people teaching right now were taught it (by the people who actually believed it to be true), they still emphasize it.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

That doesn't explain why the APA was still endorsing the useless Rorschach test as recently as last year.

[Fire Fly]

I'm almost ashamed at myself when I say this, but it was only when I took this psychology class when I finally understood how a YEC creationist could take a class on evolutionary biology and still pass.

[Darth Wong]

I used to help arts students study for their psychology courses and write their psychology essays when I was in university. Leaving aside the fact (right off the bat) that it was part of the arts faculty, I have to say that I did read those textbooks and it felt like I was back in high school. The level of difficulty required to get a psychology degree is somewhere between "laughable" and "can do with eyes closed while stoned".

[fgalkin]

You have to understand, though, that psychology is a very new discipline. So, the older generation of psychologists was still taught a lot of the stuff that has now been debunked, hence why that bullshit is still being perpetuated.

As for Freud, he was to psychology what alchemy was to chemistry. But because most of the people teaching right now were taught it (by the people who actually believed it to be true), they still emphasize it.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

That doesn't explain why the APA was still endorsing the useless Rorschach test as recently as last year.

Same reason that Freud is taught in schools, really. There are people out there who still believe in that crap.

Psychology will become a real, established science. In 200 years or so. Right now, it's crap, but that does not mean that the field itself is crap, merely the current state of it.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Eris]

To be fair, there's a growing split internal to psychology over this sort of thing. You have on the one hand the clinical psych people who are the ones that seem to be the ones thought of here. The ones that endorse things like personality tests and psychoanalysis.

There is a growing segment of research psych though that focuses much more just on what might be called neuropsychology: studying how the brain handles emotions, stimuli, what have you. While I'm pretty harsh on the clinical side of things, the research psychology is getting really interesting, and tends to have much higher standards of research. Somewhere along the par of most other biological and medical sciences.

[loomer]

Psychology is science, yes.

In bizarro-world. It's not 'true' science, though the point about neuropsychology raised above would place that field more into the realm of pychological biology, and thus, into firmer, scientific ground. The rest is science only in that it requires careful observation, some experimentation, and theories. It may just be a fluid, still developing science, but right now, it really is more like pesudo-science.

[Academia Nut]

I would hesitantly say that there is probably a segment of the psychological community that is resistant to the use of rigorous scientific methods and analysis becauseif you were to actually start looking into the root causes of why people do things, and I say root causes in terms of physical wiring and biochemistry and how those interrelate to things like experience, then you would intrude upon the realm of the soul and other such things. I remember a few weeks back when it an article was posted under the headline "Brain affects behaviour more deeply than previously thought" and all I could think was "No shit Sherlock."

Think about it, so long as there are dozens of competing, bullshit psuedo-scientific theories about psychology, then there is still room for things like the soul. But like with everything else about the world, if you shine the light of actual science upon human behaviour, then it too will be broken down and showed for what it really is. Fire is not the release of spirits or elements but a simple chemical reaction. The sun is not some deity on a chariot in the sky, but a gigantic thermonuclear explosion taking several billion years to reach completion. Man was not shaped from clay in the image of the creator of the universe, but descended from an ape in Africa, who in turn was ultimately descended from something that crawled out of the primordial ooze. People don't want to lose their irrational beliefs, and so long as things like religion are still talked about around the framework of Freud's bullshit Oedipus complex obsession then the last bastion of the supernatural will remain untouched. But as religion loses its grip on huge segments of the population in the Western world, I can see the research psychologists gaining dominance, wanting to get actual results instead of acting as secular stand-ins for confessional priests.

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

Well, it depends on what Branch of psychology you are talking about. From what I remember, Behaviorist Psychology seems fairly reliable and scientific, as the whole point of it was that psychology should only revolve around that which is observable, not part of the unobservable Psyche.

Pavlov's and B.F. Skinners, although not perfect, are still widely used and valuable in terms of utility.



I have to say I haven't been exposed to much of Freud in any of the psychology courses I have had for education. He's, quite frankly, not all that useful, and it has been made apparent in the courses that the bulk of his ideas have been debunked. He usually gets about a paragraph in the textbook as a historical note in how he strarted off the field of therapy. Some ideas are used today that aren't pseudo-science, though, including the concept of (and some in particular) defense mechanisms. However, anyone using Freud seriously as a model of thought processing or personality is doing a shoddy job.

I briefly remember talking about Piaget, but I don't know much about him other than some of his developmental stages that we use in Ed. Psyche. Many modern psychology books devote sections to attacking his ideas, so many of them don't taut him as entirely useful, much less correct. Tomorrow when I get home, I'll get the textbook if you want to check up on it. It's fairly accessible.

However, are there any things in particular you found wrong with Piaget? I found his rigid stage development scheme implausible, and that also seems to be the bulk of the criticism I can find. However, most seem to indicate that, although his time-frames were wrong, several contributions to the field are still useful. For example, children do go through semi-motor, pre-operational, operational and formal stages charaterizing general elements he mentioned he observed, but they aren't nearly as rigid as he thought. Something simliar is said of Erick Erickson. A lot of his ideas are simply too rigid, segmented, but many of the observations do occure at one point or another, and usually around general time-frames. I would appreciate your information, though.



Something I find really unscientific, so far, is the study of intelligence. I am more a proponent of the general intelligence theory, but there's this thing called "multiple intelligence" propounded by a few that I don't really support. I think a problem with this theory, for instance, is that it expands from the concept of learning styles into types of intelligences.


Could you also be more specific when you talk about motivation and multiple theories? I am aware of a few, but they tend to focus on different causes and ways of motivating, but in both cases, each contributes but is inadequate. For example, there are theories of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

[Academia Nut]

Seeing as I only have a very basic layman's view of psychology, I will of course defer to someone with greater expertise, but when I talk about competing theories, I mean things like this, where there are dozens of schools of thought on just interpretting the basics of the field. In comparison, there is no Newtonian Interpretation of Momentum competing with the Hamiltonian Branch over why things move. In fact, the only places where physicists are in conflict is where things get really fucking weird. The implications of the quantum mechanics are extraordinarily difficult for most people to wrap their minds around, and yet the only places where they are questioned is along the fringes such as with gravity or at extraordinarily high energies. Discussions about whether M-theory or quantum loop gravity is a more correct interpretation never question whether or not the fundamentals of the other theory are valid, because they have the the same fundamental background.

I suppose what I was trying to get at is that perhaps for the past hundred years or so that psychologists have avoided approaching the field with the same rigor as hard scientists because consciously or subconsiously, they're scared of asking the big questions, like whether or not religion is a mass delusion indoctrinated into our youth and causing billions of dollars of economic damage in lost time and untold suffering in the form of hatred, bigotry, and instilled, unnecessary self loathing and shame.

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

Well, Academia, I think one problem in psychology is that many of the theories are either not comprehensive enough or some try to be too encompassing and aren't realistic in their aspirations when you consider the subject matter. You can see the same problem in Sociology. The variables of human societies are difficult to place into strict principles, so different theories tend to miss the mark, but each helps present part of the picture.

This doesn't apply to all though. Some are just b.s., and many have been largely been abandoned. E.g. Freudian Psychology. Some still cling to it, however.

There are a lot of schools of psychology, but some of them on that list are historical and not in play today, although some of the theories' ideas have been contributed to modern ideas. For example, iirc, Gestalt psychology has fallen out of favour as a mainstream school, but it has made some valuable contributions to understanding human perception (e.g. facial perception, pattern recognition).

Different theories have made contributions, even though they have been debunked in other areas, fallen out of use, etc. Not all of them are contemporaneous. Some are, and always were pseudo-science, like phrenology, which I don't recall being a serious school of psychology today.

I mentioned Behaviorism. It's a very good theory in psychology, and it's a model for a lot of objectivity in the field. The problem, according to the research, is that Skinner's system tried to be too comprehensive. While it makes many valid observations and it has a lot of clinical and practial utility, it doesn't answer many aspects of learning and cognition that are more complex. I think Chomsky and Daniel C. Dennett talk about this in their work (the latter being Darwin's Dangerous Idea).

I also don't know if they are missing the big questions, as you claim. Psychology does deal quite a bit with religion insofar as studies of group psychology (group think, etc). Freud, ironically, does produce some useful information on religion and religious mentality. Where do they avoid the big ideas?



Edit: This particular part is reserved for Mr. Wong. I looked up the ink-blot test, and it seems you are right. I don't know why the APA advocates it, when there's a considerable block of Psychologists who don't approve of it. As well, it also seems that the method is also popular with Psychiatry, which I thought was more reliable. I actually think the ink-blot test was first devised in psychiatry, not psychology. I didn't know that until now.

[Starglider]

The hard part of psychology is all the 'biological basis' stuff (i.e. how neurons and synapses work, neurochemistry, medium and gross neuroanatomy). Not coincidentally, this is the part that looks like real science, the part that's actually showing real progress and producing useful results, and the part that I liked when I was studying it at university.

In psychology we're looking at a field undergoing the transformation from pseudoscience to real science. Biology recently entered the final stretch of that process with genome mapping and cellular scale modelling, while psychology is at a fairly early stage. Physics took thousands of years to go from philosophers making stuff up to hard science, chemistry took hundreds of years to go from alchemy to the periodic table, biology took a couple of hundred years to go from elan vitale to mapping genes. I think psychology is actually maturing fairly quickly as science goes, but it'll be a while yet before we have a good technical understanding of higher brain function, and we won't get there without kicking out a lot of pseudoscience.

For a real basket case take a look at sociology.

[Academia Nut]

Perhaps my reaction is simply frustration from an outsider looking in, but let's look at what the scientific theory has accomplished by continuously asking questions in just the past hundred years

Physics
Quantum theory
Particle/wave duality
Relativity (special and general)
Nuclear physics
Subatomic physics
Transistor
Superconductors
Aerodynamics
Space flight
The Big Bang

Biology
Antibiotics
Proof of DNA as the genetic carrier and its structure
Continuous confirmation of evolution

Chemistry
Refinement of industrial processes such as steel manufacture and petroleum processing
Synthetic fibres

And these are just examples I pulled off the top of my head while excluding the engineering applications and anything from before 1900 (incidentally, can you tell my major?). In comparison, while psychology has done some good and made some progress, it seems to be spinning its wheels in comparison. Even you admitted that despite the fact that it's bullshit, there are still modern proponents of Freud. That's like saying that there are still proponents of J.J. Thompson's plum pudding model of the atom in modern physics, which is absolutely ludicrous. And I've heard Freud's explanation for the origins of religion, and while laudable in that it was the first attempt at explaining religion as something other than the gospel truth, so to speak, I found it completely insane and suffering from the fact that the only way to reach such a conclusion was to have made it up just to fit with his view of the world! That's even worse than physicists, no matter how few in the minority, still using the plum pudding model, seeing as that actually had good experimental background at the time. That's like biologists including Piltdown Man in the evolutionary tree despite being proven a hoax.

Sorry for the venting, and I'm sure you hear this sort of thing from laymen not infrequently, but I hope you can see where I'm coming from. The scientific method isn't something you say you use, and I would see the failures of theories in psychology to stem from an improper application of the entire system and philosophy of the scientific method. A scientific theory can collapse due to lack of scope, but if it is sound, it should only do so at the fringes. The limits of special relativity as v goes to 0 come out to classical mechanics. The Shroedinger equation makes the same predictions as the Bohr model for hydrogen-like systems. Quantum theory fails to explain gravity, but that's okay because gravity is a pathetically weak force, especially at those scales, so we have to go into weird domains to start seeing its effects, and thus the predictions under normal conditions are still valid. The list goes on and on because all of the old theories were still sound. For how many psychological theories can the same thing be said?

[Superman]

There are subfields of psychology which are unquestionably pseudoscientific in nature. Parapsychology comes to mind. There are also disciplines of psychology which extend into the realm of neurology, like neuropsychology or biological psychology, which are probably more akin to a 'hard science.'

As far as Freud, I think that psychiatry and psychology generally recognize him as being one of the first to attempt to use clinical techniques to try and cure psychopathology. Many of his theories of penis envy and such may have been complete speculation (and generally useless as Wong pointed out), but I think the power of his work mostly lies in the observations that he made, such as the so-called 'Repetition Compulsion" or his "Seduction Theory." For example, his first work, 'On Aphasia' (1891), critiqued conventional ideas about the neurological basis of aphasia that had been put forward by Werneke. In that book, he also coined the term "agnosia" which we use today.

[Twoyboy]

Right, let's try this again. (I completed a reply earlier but my computer crapped itself before I submitted it - fucking Windows.)

I did science and engineering at Uni, but in final year when I met my wife, I sat in on a few of her social work lectures, including introductory psych. I must say, the lecturer taught many old theories in historical ways (as a lead in to the newer stuff) but I still didn't understand why some of this stuff was still being taught.

Some of psychology seems to be scientific, in that observations are made on which theories are made and improved. However, most early psych (and I'm sure a lot of it today) seems to work in reverse, mostly due to the arrogance of those involved with it at high levels. Thus, theories are made, and assumed to be correct until it has been shown that more harm than good has been done by its practise.

Now obviously this is what I gather from one set of lectures for which I never actually did assignments or tests, but just my personal observations.

[The Jester]

Considering the psychology is a rather new science, I would assume that part of the reason for a lot of useless history being taught is the fact that there isn't a lot of real science to be taught when compared to other sciences. They need some filler material if they want to make the courses as long as real science courses.

[Fire Fly]

-snip-

Memory organization
-Three-stage model
-Working memory
-Long-term memory modules (Declarative, procedural, semantic, episodic)
-Semantic networks
-Levels of processing theory

Intelligence
-Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences
-Fluid/crystallized intelligence
-Information-processing approach
-Practical intelligence
-Emotional intelligence

Motivation and why people do things
-Instinctual
-Drive-reduction approach
-Homeostasis
-Arousal-approach
-Incentive approach
-Cogitative approach
-Self-actualization

Emotions
-James-Lange theory of emotions
-Cannon-Bard theory of emotion
-Schachter-Singer theory of emotion

Development
-Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
-Kohlber’s Theory of Moral Development
-Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development
-Zone of proximal development

Personality
-Psychoanalytic approach: Freud, Jung, Horney, Adler
-Behavioral approach to personality: Skinner, Bandura
-Carl Roger’s humanistic approach to personality
-Biological and evolutionary approach
-Trait Theory: Allport, Cattell, Eysenck

Dreams
-Freud's latent and manifest content of dreams
-Dreams for survival theory
-Activation-synthesis theory