Psychology

You're basically saying that because I think that psychology is a science (which it is), therefore I'm a faggot. Your conclusion does not follow your premise: How does being a faggot relate to thinking that psychology is a real, hard science?

If you want to accuse me of faggotry, then you have to define the term faggot.

Why the fuck would you post a picture of Freud?

faggotry status : double confirmed

Because he's the father of psychoanalysis.

Lads, I agree that humanities based/standard social sciences model of psychology is a meme.

However, evolutionary psychology produces testable hypotheses and is wholly based in neodarwinism, instead of overtly liberal or archaic Freudian reckonings.

It's a young science and therefore it has had its fair share of growing pains and embarrassments, for example the sort of excitable memes like 'women are better at differentiating between shades of colour, because they foraged for berries', however it's really coming into its own as a discipline.

It has essentially excised the study of human behaviour from philosophical and cultural ideology and placed it firmly within the field of ethology and subsequently primatology.

It's a controversial and hilarious science to be honest and it's driving SJW and FemiNazis insane.

He's the father of pseudoscientific drivel.

Dragging the study of human behaviour out of the gutter of intuitive inference and baseless reasoning has been a painfully slow process, but humanities based psychology is now on its death bed.

David Buss is a retard.
Extensive studies have been performed that showed that the majority of people outright refuse to kill another human being even when their lives are in danger. This is basic military psych.

I should've posted a picture of Nietzsche instead.

>psychology is a real science
We laugh about it, because it truly isn't. But, doesn't it make you want to cry when you understand it is actually treated seriously in clinical settings?

People who haven't had their innate psychological mechanism for homocide triggered.

user, the overwhelming majority of homicides are carried out by males between the ages of 17-30, just as the overwhelming majority of homicide victims are males of the same age.

We have developed mechanisms for homicide, intra-sex rivalry and in-group/out-group mentality that, given the right circumstances, result in killing.

youtube.com/watch?v=kszzJjtv2oo

When you admit that sensplorationists are right.

It's not.

I like psychology and readily understand that abstract lateral / top down approaches have as much value as low level mechanistic ones. In modern times, ie the era of science as religion, "not a science" has become an insult. It's like being called a heretic, a pretender, or a charlatan. In reality science and its method has a definition, the universe is mechanical, and therefore the field is largely unable to resolve reliable and repeatedable constants. Just general patterns and tendencies, but not absolute fundamental laws.

People at large are stupid. Just move on, and pursue your interests on your own or with people you trust and connect with. Or strangers, just not on the internet. Never on the internet.

homicide*

I hate my phone.

>pic related

A science just needs testable and, therefore, falsifiable (informally) logical hypotheses.

For example:

Females should be more likely to pursue a short term mating strategy around ovulation.

Recruit a sample of women and ask them to keep a diary of when they feel the desire to commit infidelity, including thoughts of infidelity/sexual fantasies.

This process can be anonymised.

Then collect data on menstrual cycles and compare ovulation dates with the data from the diaries, in order to see whether there is a positive correlation between ovulation and actions or thoughts of infidelity.

Repeat the experiment and design new experiments, then subject the data pool to systematic review and meta-analyses, including checking for publication bias by comparing registered studies with those published.

Science; ta da!

True, and that's exactly what psychology is all about. If it doesn't follow the scientific method, then it ain't psychology.

Exactly.

I've been very critical of meme psychology in the past and previously visited psychology lectures and open days at universities around my country, where the subject is placed in the humanities department.

I grilled the lecturers in the Q&A and afterwards about how psychology can be considered a humanities subject, how 'biological psychology' is considered a branch of psychology when all psychology is biology and why it isn't placed in the natural sciences, as a sub-discipline of ethology.

Some agreed, however most had no idea how to respond and attempted to run away from the questions (literally 'run away' on a few occasions).

This didn't make me very popular with many, however I made some good allies in the fight against pseudoscience and unscientific teaching.

Also, yes I'm a bit of an autist.

Again. This highlights correlations and unearths patterns, it does not resolve base mechanical truths that apply everywhere in the same conditions. It does not tell you what aspect of a given woman is generating this behavior, nor will it necessarily tell you much in 1000 years when the human species has further drifted apart (speaking hypothetically).

This is why neuroscience is a science, and psychology and sociology are not. Both of the latter have massive power in modern society, and they do work, but they're not sciences and shouldn't try to pretend they are. It's not the point, and it's not such a bad thing.

How would you ensure your participants will be truthful?

user, you don't know what science is:

>A science just needs testable and, therefore, falsifiable (informally) logical hypotheses

That's it.

>This highlights correlations and unearths patterns, it does not resolve base mechanical truths that apply everywhere in the same conditions.

The 'base mechanical truths' of science are merely high degrees of correlation, that are significantly higher than could be achieved by chance.

In highly applied sciences the degree of accuracy is typically a lot lower than, say, that of the more abstract fields such as physics.

For example, a result of 98% positive in physics would be considered highly ambiguous in relation to the detection of 'polarised' radiation signals emanating from before the formation of the CMB, as 99.9999% would be required to discount a spurious signal.

However, in medicine or psychology 98% would be a remarkable finding!

Science is the process of highlighting correlations and unearthing patterns, not establishing truth user.

You're thinking of formal logic, in the form of mathematics.

Well, that's just it.

You'd have to rely on the anonymity and the fact that they signed up for the study in the first place.

This is one of the drawbacks of highly applied sciences, such as medicine and psychology.

When conducting drug trials, you have to rely on a degree of trust in the trial participants, especially if it isn't conducted in a clinical setting.

For example, you have to trust that the patients will actually take their medications and in the doses prescribed, as well as that they will give accurate lifestyle information.

This means that these sciences are fuzzier and less accurate than physics or organic chemistry, however that doesn't mean that they aren't sciences, nor that they should be discarded.

You're conflating the "'what" (data and observation) with the resulting meaning and "why", which is only informed by the scientific method but not created by it.

Science is about resolving laws, and while they're not terms I use internally, this is why people delineate between fields that are "hard" and "soft" sciences. If you take a cluster of 15 neurons from the occipital regions of a rat, and use high precision equipment to monitor every synapse and dendrite between each of these cells, and notice how they fire and turn their inputs on and off when exposed to a checkerboard or a rotating gradient, while bearing in mind the knowable nature of your measurement device, that is a scientific observation. You can evaluate this along with the machinery of the cell and infer how this type of system will work, regardless of context. It is a notion built on the base laws of the universe.

The difference between top down approaches and those that try to address the perceived fundamentals is that one scales much better than the other. The notion of just evaluating what a given "object" does, without caring for its finer composition, in relation to a given context is ontologically faulty and only informs good heuristics. By your definition of science, infants learning language is an example of the scientific method. As is learning to not get hit in traffic. I like abstracting to the most general case and lateral relationships, but this is much too broad to be of any utility.

>infants learning language is an example of the scientific method. As is learning to not get hit in traffic.

That's utter bullshit, user.

As I said:

>A science just needs testable and, therefore, falsifiable (informally) logical hypotheses

Children learning languages and learning to avoid traffic do not involve falsifiable hypotheses that make testable predictions.

If a hypothesis is tested and its predictions turn out to be accurate to a significant degree, as determined by statistical analysis, then it's scientifically valid.

>Science is about resolving laws

Indeed, however these laws can be described formally or informally.

For example:

>Females are more likely to pursue a short term mating strategy around ovulation.

That's an informal description of a probabilistic law relating to female mating strategies, which may also be described formally within a mathematical model.

>The notion of just evaluating what a given "object" does, without caring for its finer composition...

Well, of course evolutionary psychologists work alongside neuroscientists and attempt to physically define psychological mechanisms.

In fact, many prominent evolutionary psychologists double as theoretical neuroscientists.

You can make a definition between soft and hard scientists if you wish, as I did in my last post:

>This means that these sciences are fuzzier and less accurate than physics or organic chemistry

However, falsifiable hypotheses that make testable predictions and whose predictions are verified by experimentation and the subsequent mathematical analyses of empirical data, is what science is all about.

Hard/soft

Clear/fuzzy

Make all the distinctions you want, however nothing you say will contradict the scientific nature of certain highly applied disciplines, despite their relatively high margins of error.

If a hypothesis has been experimentally verified, then the model it contains is scientifically sound.

In addition to this:

>Females are more likely to pursue a short term mating strategy around ovulation.

Why did we come to this conclusion?

Well, firstly why do we think human females are promiscuous?

Human males have testicle sizes and seminal volumes that indicate sperm competition and typically reflect those of promiscuous species, as well as sperms that act solely to kill foreign sperm which stays active for 72 hours.

This would indicate that over evolutionary history human females would have frequently mated with more than one male within a 72 hour period.

Now, human females are most fertile around ovulation and therefore if a female were to engage a short term mating strategy, they would be more likely to do so at optimal fertility; as females that did so would have outbred those that did not.

Females are also more likely to pursue typically attractive and masculine males around this time, which is a phenomenon referred to as the Sexy Son Hypothesis.

>This has been experimentally confirmed.

Essentially, females are out shopping for alternative genes to increase the genetic diversity of their offspring, therefore they will be looking for the most bang for their buck, so to speak.

Anyway, there's some insight into evolutionary psychology, which is entirely built upon a neodarwinian framework and testable hypotheses.

>Indeed, however these laws can be described formally or informally.
No. Either they're a law and viewed as such, or they aren't. Anything else is a high level heuristic to deal with a wide spectrum of possibilities and a lack of access to complete information. You see these heuristics in all applied sciences, but they're based on core fundamentals. Psychology lacks these fundamentals, for good reason.

>description of a probabilistic law relating to female mating strategies
There isn't any valid use of a "probabilistic law". You can laws about things that by their nature and as far as what we have access to, appear to behave probabilistically, but that's a law. Not a probabilistic law. Again, you're describing heuristics.

Also, stemming from each element of your logical framework there's a grand web of interlocking chains to deal with variables and uncertainty. This is the very definition of a refined heuristic.

>Well, of course evolutionary psychologists work alongside neuroscientists and attempt to physically define psychological mechanisms.
Yes, because psychology on its own does very poorly at being "scientific" and you ultimately have to bridge the two to properly push ahead either one. I'm not saying psychology is useless or doesn't have value. Using psychology and theory of mind I predicted things 15 years ago that people told me were all bullshit. Modern times roll around and finally neuroscience has caught up such that one by one what I experienced as true has not only been socially validated, but begun to have its underlying mechanics unraveled.

Just as Democritus combined elements of the two prevailing philosophies of the time to formalize a notion of "atoms", this has always been how it works between fields.

>If a hypothesis has been experimentally verified, then the model it contains is scientifically sound.
Conflating what is seen, with what is ultimately thought, again. There's a bit more epistemological depth than that.

user, based on this post I can tell you that we're essentially arguing semantics at this point.

Psychology is a science, as it is based on falsifiable hypotheses that make testable predictions.

Now, it indeed may yield refined heuristics, whereas physics yields invariable laws, however that doesn't mean it isn't a science.

Science isn't defined by the ability to discern invariable laws, but rather by the ability to formulate falsifiable hypotheses and make testable predictions.

If you want to redefine science, then go ahead.

However, I should note that the only thing we seem to disagree on is the definition of science.

Is sport psychology a science? I've just completed my MSc in it and, I have to say, it doesn't seem very scientific. Too much qualitative research and poor application of the scientific method in quantitative research, I've essentially just wasted the best part of £10,000 on a meme degree.

What you described is more or less just biology. At such a point psychology is just a shell field. Which is fine. Again, I'm not saying it doesn't get results, or that it's invalid, or that it's useless, or whatever such shit. I'm saying it doesn't resolve any underlying constants. It just shows that something can happen, and this happening clusters or is potentiated by a certain environment. It says little about what it is for it to happen, why specifically it happens, and when it MUST happen.

Men respond to subtle differences in female proportions and scent when they're most fertile as well. This is the same as noting that warmer lakes are typically greener than cold ones. Why, what is it be greener.

Anyway, I don't really care about if something is a science or not enough to spend more of my day arguing about. They're all just tools. Look at what crowd psychology is capable of despite not being strictly scientific.

What I just described is evolutionary psychology, which is a sub-discipline of biology.

Yes, we pretty much agree on everything apart from the definition of 'science'.

I'm with Karl Popper on this one, despite being based in observational cosmology and, therefore, in a 'hard' science.

One last thing...

>I'm saying it doesn't resolve any underlying constants

Yes, well that's where neuroscience, evolutionary biology, computer science, mathematics, biochemistry and physics come into the picture.

It'll take an broad interdisciplinary approach to figure out how the structural arrangement of organic matter results in observable human behaviour.

Yes, our disagreement is mainly semantic and doesn't have any functional basis. You appear to subdivide laws into formal and informal, I say there's only one thing to be called a law and file the "probabilistic" aspects under fluid heuristics meant to define a spectrum that's composed of ranges, and relevant elements that tie in (as well as intra-association). It's very possible we're doing similar mental operations but simply see them differently, whether that difference is truly able to be logically supported or is more of a feeling related thing that's dependent on what works best within a given machine, in this case our brains. I don't know, and it doesn't really matter.

Luckily we can recognize this. Veeky Forums is very similar to gambling, and it results in irrational usage patterns and eventual addiction-like behaviors once you've become raveled into a thread. I'm poorly using time that I don't even have, and I have to go.

Indeed.

We're just calibrated a little differently, however are essentially describing the same thing.

And ok bye.

It's all fucking subjective cannot be proven objective therefore pseudo science.

everything is subjective though my dude

how could i possibly trust that any of the observations made in testing and determining the known laws of physics weren't subjective

Because of instruments.

who makes and reads the instruments though? :^)

Anything actually useful you learned from it? For example overall tips for upping performance, inducing flow or preventing burn out?

just because it falls into the category of "social science" doesn't mean it's entirely useless. social sciences use the scientific method to the extent which it is possible for the given field, but will never be a "science" in the truest sense of the word, because it's tough to truly falsify any "theory" in a social science, or reproduce an experiment/study.

e.g. a conclusion from a study in psychology is far more limited and localized than a conclusion from a publication in physics, because physical law is universal, while a sample group of 100 in a psychology study can only say so much about people as a whole.

social sciences will have this limitation as long as natural sciences are unable to make good conclusions about phenomena within social science. i think a bigger problem is differentiating within social sciences which conclusions are valid and which are not

tl;dr: social sciences are limited in scope because any conclusions that are made by them are difficult to make universally applicable, but they aren't necessarily useless

Psychology in a nutshell:
>Get a massive dataset
>Check if anything correlates with anything
>Use all statistical tests you know
>Find a pMake a story to support this random finding
>Publish in a crappy/mediocre journal
>Get tenure

>innate psychological mechanism

There's no evidence this exist. The military spends tons of money on designing methods to overcome soldiers minds via muscle memory because of how difficult it is to get a human being to kill another person. Prior to the use of these training methods after the Vietnam War, the majority of soldiers did not attempt to kill anyone.

Homicides are not normal, the average person does not commit murder.

Actually it goes:

>Draw up a logically viable falsifiable hypothesis
>Get a massive dataset
>Check if the targets of measurement correlate with one another
>Use the statistical tests described when you registered the study with the ethics committee
>Discover the p value (positive/negative and whether it's statistical significant)
>Submit for publication
>Get published if it's a positive result, the editor and peer reviewers are favorable to your model and if they consider it interesting enough
>Get cited a lot
>Get tenure

What you described is 'bad science' and that's why we have systematic reviews and meta-analyses, which check for publication bias and methodological inconsistencies by comparing published studies and studies registered with ethics committees.

Lets be honest mate, few institutions require registration of those kind of details with the ethics committee.

I've worked in labs doing harder science than psychology where decisions about statistical tests, sample sizes and power calculations were done after the fact. Hell, I've seen PIs tell students/postdocs to "just increase your n number until you get significance"

Maybe a little bit, but it's still very fuzzy. For example, the most popular method of applied sport psychology is called 'psychological skills training', which includes goal-setting, visualisation, relaxation, and imagery. This is what >90% of sport psychs will use, but the evidence base behind it is actually pretty shit (in terms of performance enhancement). Many sport psychs are essentially just bullshit merchants who throw out motivational phrases once in a while, and I've become disillusioned with the subject because of it.

That said, there are a few well-established techniques, and some which look promising. You should definitely adopt a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset, as it motivates you to react more positively to setbacks. Similarly, you should focus on and judge yourself on the process of performing a particular skill (e.g. kicking a ball cleanly, in the direction you want it to go) rather than the outcome (e.g. scoring a goal). There are lots of things that have been found to be linked to flow (e.g. balance between challenge and skill, feeling capable, feeling like you chose the activity freely), but lots of these things come naturally. A recent trend is to encourage people to meditate more and increase their mindfulness, and that's been found to enhance flow too (that's sort of what my dissertation is on). Finally, on burnout, iirc that has much more to do with the coaching/training climate - ensuring that the coach supports the athlete's basic needs, gives them time off when needed, etc.

>There's no evidence this exist.

Homicides occur all over the world, in all types of societies; it's a human universal.

They are majorly carried out by men between the ages of 17-30 and the victims are typically males of the same age.

The typical underlying causes of male on male homicide relate to intra-sex rivalry, for example verbal denigration of a mate rival in an attempt to lower his status resulting in provoked homicide, or as an adaption to mate poaching (cuckolding).

>The military spends tons of money on designing methods to overcome soldiers minds via muscle memory because of how difficult it is to get a human being to kill another person.

Yes, user.

This refers to external agents being unable to elicit a homicidal response in the absence of appropriate context.

Which is exactly what we would expect.

Humans don't typically kill on a whim; they only do so in specific contexts.

In defence of kin, for example, or in self defence, which may seem obvious.

However, the majority of homicides do not relate to kin protection and the majority of attempted homicides are not initiated in self defence, even though many actual homicides may be.

Intra-sex rivalry produces male on male homicidal violence and the majority of killers and victims of homicide are males.

Therefore, it is likely that, as we will have evolved psychological mechanisms to deal with intra-sex rivalry, homicide is indeed one of them.

>Lets be honest mate, few institutions require registration of those kind of details with the ethics committee.

I completely agree mate, and that's why it's so important that we raise awareness of this, as Ben Goldacre had done.

>I've worked in labs doing harder science than psychology where decisions about statistical tests, sample sizes and power calculations were done after the fact.

I know exactly what you mean and I've seen the same thing myself, it's awful.

>Hell, I've seen PIs tell students/postdocs to "just increase your n number until you get significance"

That's disgusting.

Anyway lad m8, the underlying premise here is that while science might be shat all over by incompetence and malevolence, especially in the highly applied sciences like medicine and psychology, that shit isn't science: it's bad science.

So...

Does it fall prey to human bias and error?

Yes.

More so than harder sciences, like physics?

Yes.

However, does that mean it isn't a science?

No, it just means humans are idiots and in areas of less accuracy that idiocy has more wiggle room, especially since transparency and the requirement to register studies is a half dead shit show.

We need to increase transparency and make it legally required to register studies properly and publish all studies within one year of completion.

That's a problem that affects all of us in science, although it's crippling medicine.

>We need to increase transparency and make it legally required to register studies properly and publish all studies within one year of completion.

Couldn't agree more.

I'm not the guy who was saying psychology isn't science btw, I merely mistook your idealistic comments for naivety :)

Totally understandable; it's quite difficult to gauge these things online and especially in a place where the majority of posters are indeed absolute melons.

Psychology is a great field and I wish there was a place to discuss it without the thread devolving into an argument about the legitimacy of it as a science, but until then, this'll have to do.

Psychology is a science. Freudian psychoanalysis is not. The subconscious cannot be accurately studied and observed and most methods Freud theorized of dredging up the subconscious are tough to observe and take seriously. While he did have some good, or rather, interesting concepts about said subconscious, there is no real way to measure it.

On the other hand, the more psychology goes away from philosophy the more it becomes a science. (I love philosophy too, but in a scientific field it has little place.) The problem is, more and more psychologists find it hard to get away from Freud's ideals and look at things objectively.

Because the mind is hard (read: essentially impossible) to measure, the only way to look at things objectively is a mixture. Examine the patients situation and have them describe how they feel, then use that to diagnose an issue or suggest objective treatment. In an ideal world, it'd be this easy. But since you can't just simply objectively address an issue in lieu of behaviorism, a healthy mix of all real psychological perspectives is the best. However, this makes it less of a science because when the problems have to be viewed subjectively and aren't literally observable for the most part, you are unable to view the results without personal opinion.

Sorry for writing like shit, it's early.