Is psychology a meme field?

someone explain

Why do people always focus on the clinical side of psych? I can understand the issues with experimental psych having replication issues, but theirs still even more to it than that.

Psychology relies too much on subjective and unique experiences so a lot of it is based on "case studies" and not hard facts that can easily be replicated.

I would say 8 parts are meme, 2 parts are useful. On one hand you have tangible and quite scientific branches like social psychology, psychometrics etc. while the main bulk that consists of things like psychoanalysis, developmental psychology etc. is crap. And I mean utter crap. The entire discipline is a mess of unbelievable proportions once you are forced to study for exams and go past the surface stuff. It is there where "science" becomes a VERY loose term and as anons have pointed out, reproducibility and statistical rigorosity become a joke. In a nutshell, you have the useful parts of psychology branching off into their own disciplines and merging with economics or statistics, while the main parts sinks into oblivion evermore. In nations like Germany here, where you need a certain HS GPA to even enter this field (a very high one mind you, a 3.7 GPA equivalent or even higher), another problem arises: the field stagnates at an extreme pace. people that can memorize facts and nothing else go into this degree, fag everything up, and a vicious cycle ensures. ah i could go on but trust me, psychology is crap.

Shame. I want to become a psychologist because they make alright money and I'm good at listening to people and empathize. In this country (Norway) the GPA needed is pretty high as well straight out of HS to get in.

nature.com/news/first-results-from-psychology-s-largest-reproducibility-test-1.17433?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews
Social psychology is stupid crasp as well, asshat.
Do yourself a favor and enter an other field that does have actual job prospectives.
Yes.

With the exception of psychometrics and IQ what you say about notconforming to the scientific method is just not there.

There was a study recently where a group tried to reproduce a sample of 100 studies and they couldn't reproduce like half of them.

And here's a source nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail-reproducibility-test-1.18248

Apparently there's a growing market for psychologists here, but I'll be honest I haven't met many. I'm currently a nurse and I have worked with psychologists before but they work at psychiatric centers and the psych ward at the hospital mostly. Seems like decent work to me if I were to change my career path.

>I'm good at listening to people and empathize.

Well you have to know that psychiatry isn't equal with psychology. You have to get licenses and various other crap after your degree to do this. But well, if this IS your passion, give it a go. I did it too, but was disappointed.

>Social psychology is stupid crasp as well, asshat.

No asshole, it actually is the single most useful branch of psychology, giving tangible results and use them in life. Not that it matters much, but still.

It more matters on if he wants to go the medical route and give prescriptions or not with the psychiatrist route, if not might as well just be a counselor.

You need a silence for both, tough. Psychiatry is a medical specialty that MDs take while Psychologist is a title reserved for people that studied the field for six years at college, which is exactly the same length as medicine. At least in this country. You need to apply to the national directory of health to get a license to practice both professions.

I need to put in a lot of money to get the prerequisites I need for psychology but medicine would take virtually the same effort to get into so I'm tempted to just take that instead since I want to become a doctor more then I want to become a psychologist.

The problem with doing any kind of meaningful psychological research is that one has to quantify subjective elements in order to measure them. This is often the case when studying behavior.

For example, how can one quantify jealousy or anger. A logical approach would be to count the instances of these emotions for each individual in the experiment. The instances are determined via visual queues that demonstrate that the subject is facilitating an emotional response.

The problem is that things get complicated rather quickly and it becomes too reliant on interpretation.

Another problem is reproducibility. A reason for this might be the problem listed above but it can also be a variety of other reasons such as not controlling all the variables well enough.

Finally there's the issue with making a claim from the evidence you have. It becomes difficult, due to the interpretation of the evidence in psychology, to actually make a legitimate claim about whether or not your evidence asserts what you think it asserts.

The nature of psychological experiments requires reducing fairly complicated behaviors to simple and measurable cues.

But to reduce requires removing. The question then becomes if the reduced concept accurately portrays the original concept to begin with.

I just want to add that despite all these obstacles there have been sound psychological theories that have passed tests of reproducibility such as cognitive dissonance.

Also psychology is a rather large field. While things like personality psychology or evolutionary psychology are bullshit (you can always interpret and twist things to show that there is an evolutionary advantage for them) there are fields such as cognitive psychology that are much more sound.

Okay sorry, I didn't know that these professions differ in different languages. But what can I say, you certainly know more about the actual work than me. I've only seen the academic side of psychology. Good luck with your decision.

Well meme is a subfield of psychology. So if psychology were a subscience of meme science, then memes = psychology.

So that would imply that we are all faggots.

So no contradiction so far.

Social psy struggles with the replication problem more than other fields of psy.
Not here. Too many individuals want the same limited jobs available. Going into psy is a terrible career choice here, but perhaps it is differet in your country.

Heres the problem with psychology.

Its barely understood.

Research programs can find patterns in all sorts of behaviors from imperical data, but asserting a unique reason for these patterns emerging has been incredibly difficult from the beginning.

Unfortunately, without a much deeper understanding of neuroscience, psychology is a meme.

Meant neurology, not neuroscience.