Does Veeky Forums consider psychology a science? Why do you / why not?
I'm an social psychologist, and what I do is basically measure human behavior in accordance with the scientific method
I know that the stigma of psychology basically boils down to facebook posts saying "if a friendship lasts more than 7 years, it will last a lifetime" or other related spiritual bullshit. So it's pretty understandable that people toss it in the thrash right next to astrology
However, allow me to explain one of my personal favorite experiments to demonstrate what social psychology is
If you want to look it up, it's from Loftus and Palmer (1974)
People were shown a video of 2 cars crashing. It's short. 2 cars crash, some debris flies around and that's it. Participants were then divided into 5 groups. One week after the video was shown, participants were asked to recall certain aspects of the video. Specifically, they were asked if they remembered there to be broken glass in the video of the 2 cars crashing into each other (there was none). They also asked participants to report the estimated speed of the 2 cars
For each of the 5 groups, the researchers used different phrasings of the question. "Did you see any broken glass when they/how fast were the 2 cars driving when they" smashed (1) /collided (2) /bumped (3) /hit (4) /contacted (5) each other?
And lo and behold, people reported there to be far more glass when the experimenter used the word "smashed". The mean estimated speed was a lot higher as well when the word "smashing" was used (40.8mph) versus when the word "contacted" was used (31.8mph)
What does this tell us? Memory is a very malleable thing; things as simple as the phrasing of a question can affect someone's recollection of there being broken glass, or the speed of a car. Eyewitness reports, for example, can depend heavily on the phrasing of the investigator
How is this not a measurable, valid scientific field? Please discuss Veeky Forums, I'm curious about your opinion