Thoughts on psychology as a science? Are psychologists scientists?

Thoughts on psychology as a science? Are psychologists scientists?

no

Of course not. Don't be a fuckwit

Do psychologists:
Produce testable hypotheses?
Perform controlled experiments?
Collect quantifiable data?
Follow the scientific method?

The answer is yes to many branches of psychology, so yes, psychologists are scientists, depending on their field.

what would be a field that does not qualify as scientific?

>Do psychologists:
Produce testable hypotheses?
Nope, statistical testing only yields probability of your hypothesis. Accordingly, results of replicated studies more often than not disagree with the observations of the original study.
>Perform controlled experiments?
Psyhcologists can typically fulfill this criterium.
>Collect quantifiable data?
This one varies per study. Cognitive experiemnts can use reaction times which are great in this regard. Unfrotunately, it is common in psychology to rely on self-report questionnaires. Other methods that are often employed are also indirect, relative, oo otherwise flawed in some way.
>Follow the scientific method?
Nope, see above for the shortcomings in this field. All progress that is made in psychology, actually derives from other fields such as biology, medicine, and neuroscience.

The verdict is that psychology needs to overcome its fundamental problems before qualifying as a legit branch of science.

Social psychology without a doubt. It faces the worst replication crisis of all disciplines within the field. Furthermore, there is wild liberal bias that is completely unacceptable.

I'd rather them keep out of science. they have nothing to win trying to emulate physics.
they should have kept as a meme field such as literature or whatever.
reading Freud is more interesting than reading a study where 5000 idiots where asked a set of questions and the result of analysing the data was: we found nothing at all xD

medicine and biology typically share thesse problems so they aren't sciences either.

sociology and parts of social psychology if it is int experiment based.

Not in a million years

Technically yes but Psychology as a science is in its infancy so I wouldn't expect any groundbreaking revelations any time soon. Psychology strikes me as an outdated study of neurology relying on introspection and theory as if MRI's were never invented.

One user summed it up well. A scientist can be a psychologist, but someone who is solely a psychologist cannot be a scientist.

A person who comes to mind as being scientific psychologist is Stanley Milgram. He studied mainly one area of social psychology for most of his life, and actually contributed something worthwhile with the Milgram experiment.

A sole psychologist that I think of is Sigmund Freud.

Good points.
Not to mention ANYONE can read it and understand it instantly. Very low threshold.

Should stop wasting tax dollars on it.

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>wew we use symbols also
>does that mean we are rigorous senpai?

you don't have to do experiments or collect data to be a scientist.

A number of subfields are, but many are not, or are looked upon as producing weak results

this is a misunderstanding people seem to have here on Veeky Forums - the idea that psychology doesn't involve things like neuroimaging.

True. Controlled experiments are a boon, but are not required by a field. See: astronomy, geology, paleontology.

The validity of scientific results should ultimately be judged based on the researchers' approach rather than their field of study.

Except that MRI results are also widely ridiculed as being especially prone to false positive results.

>medicine and biology typically share these problems so they aren't sciences either.
Both medicine and biology have subfields of so-called hard science to fall back on, such as biochemistry. Psychology has no such solid basis. It invariably comes down to a p-value and thats it.
Thanks. Japan had the same idea you had and enacted major cuts in the social science departments.

what do you even mean by "fall back on".

doesn't psychology
"fall back" on biology?

That it has a strong theoretical basis.
Yes, and that is precisely the problem. Biology can fall back on biology. Psychology has to fall back on biology which renders psychology pointless since it fails to contribute anything on its own.

whats wrong with psychology having a theoretical basis in biology? thats what you would expect, just as parts of biology have basis in chemsitry and chemistry from physics. its just one continuum.

and ofcourse psychology has made contributions on its own. infact many. psychologys biggest critics are usually those who know next to nothing about it.

>whats wrong with psychology having a theoretical basis in biology? thats what you would expect, just as parts of biology have basis in chemsitry and chemistry from physics. its just one continuum.
The problem is that it shows psychology has to rely on other fields. That reveals shortcomings of psychology. Pointing out that there is a continuum is no excuse.

>and ofcourse psychology has made contributions on its own. infact many.
I am not aware of these numerous contributions psychology has made. Care to name 5 of them?
>psychologys biggest critics are usually those who know next to nothing about it.
Not an argument.

>The problem is that it shows psychology has to rely on other fields.

According to this logic then math would be the only valid science, which it is clearly not.

psychology no.

but psychometrics / psychografics can be considered a result-yielding science.

More so in the 60's and 70's then now. Back then they actually replicated their findings multiple times experimentally; like for example Milgram, Zajonc and Latane. Now you are lucky if you are able to conduct several experiments on the same phenomenon without losing funding.

Science isn't a field. Certain fields are treated more scientifically more often than others but anything in life can be looked at scientifically. Even art.

Science is a process of analysis. You take empirical facts or problems, reason with them and other facts, perhaps experiment, and draw conclusions to which there are no reasonable alternative theories. Then you have done science. Science is detective work. It can be done anywhere.