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Times Events. Times Store. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options. 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. 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. And to me the field certainly seems to have its uses.
The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. Ashutosh Jogalekar is a chemist interested in the history, philosophy and sociology of science. He is fascinated by the logic of scientific discovery and by the interaction of science with public sentiments and policy.
He blogs at The Curious Wavefunction and can be reached at curiouswavefunction gmail. Follow Ashutosh Jogalekar on Twitter. However, it can be traced back to ancient Greece, — years BC.
The emphasis was a philosophical one, with great thinkers such as Socrates influencing Plato, who in turn influenced Aristotle. Plato argued that there was a clear distinction between body and soul, believed very strongly in the influence of individual difference on behavior, and played a key role in developing the notion of "mental health", believing that the mind needed stimulating by the arts to keep it alive.
Aristotle firmly believed in the idea that the body strongly affected the mind - you might say he was an early bio psychologist. Psychology as a science took a "back seat" until Descartes - wrote in the 17th century. He believed strongly in the concept of consciousness, maintaining that it was that that separated us from animals.
He did, however, believe that our bodies could influence our consciousness and that the beginnings of these interactions were in the pineal gland - we know now that this is probably NOT the case! From this influential work came other important philosophies about psychology, including work by Spinoza - and Leibnitz - But there still was no single, scientific, unified psychology as a separate discipline you could certainly argue that there still isn't!
When asked the question "Who is the parent of psychology? Whether this is the case or not is open to debate, but if we were to ask who the parent of experimental psychology is, few would be likely to respond in the same way.
So where did modern experimental psychology come from and why? Psychology took so long to emerge as a scientific discipline because it needed time to consolidate. Understanding behavior, thoughts and feelings is not easy, which may explain why it was largely ignored between ancient Greek times and the 16th century. But tired of years of speculation, theory and argument, and bearing in mind Aristotle's plea for scientific investigation to support theory, psychology as a scientific discipline began to emerge in the late 's.
Wilheim Wundt developed the first psychology lab in Introspection was used, but systematically i. It was really a place from which to start thinking about how to employ scientific methods to investigate behavior. The classic movement in psychology to adopt these strategies were the behaviorists, who were renowned for their reliance on controlled laboratory experiment and rejection of any unseen or subconscious forces as causes of behavior.
And later, the cognitive psychologists adopted this rigorous i. Psychoanalysis has great explanatory power and understanding of behavior, but is has been accused of only explaining behavior after the event, not predicting what will happen in advance and of being unfalsifiable. Some have argued that psychoanalysis has approached the status more of a religion than a science, but it is not alone in being accused of unfalsifiable evolutionary theory has too — why is anything the way it is?
Because it has evolved that way! Kline argues that psychoanalytic theory can be broken down into testable hypotheses and tested scientifically. For example, Scodel postulated that orally dependent men would prefer larger breasts a positive correlation , but in fact found the opposite a negative correlation. Although Freudian theory could be used to explain this finding through reaction formation — the subject showing exactly the opposite of their unconscious impulses!
Behaviorism has parsimonious i. Behaviorists firmly believed in the scientific principles of determinism and orderliness, and thus came up with fairly consistent predictions about when an animal was likely to respond although they admitted that perfect prediction for any individual was impossible. The behaviorists used their predictions to control the behavior of both animals pigeons trained to detect life jackets and humans behavioral therapies and indeed Skinner , in his book Walden Two , described a society controlled according to behaviorist principles.
Cognitive psychology — adopts a scientific approach to unobservable mental processes by advancing precise models and conducting experiments upon behavior to confirm or refute them.
Full understanding, prediction and control in psychology is probably unobtainable due to the huge complexity of environmental, mental and biological influences upon even the simplest behavior i. You will see therefore, that there is no easy answer to the question 'is psychology a science? But many approaches of psychology do meet the accepted requirements of the scientific method, whilst others appear to be more doubtful in this respect.
There are alternatives to empiricism, such as rational research, argument and belief. The humanistic approach another alternative values private, subjective conscious experience and argues for the rejection of science. The humanistic approach argues that objective reality is less important than a person's subjective perception and subjective understanding of the world. Because of this, Carl Rogers and Maslow placed little value on scientific psychology, especially the use of the scientific laboratory to investigate both human and other animal behavior.
This is what the humanistic approach aims to do. Humanism is a psychological perspective that emphasizes the study of the whole person. Humanistic psychologists look at human behavior not only through the eyes of the observer, but through the eyes of the person doing the behaving.
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