Psychology

>quantifiability
Well, duh it's not quantifiable, we don't have computers that can read thoughts, yet. But don't you think it could be quantifiable some day? Most of the most revolutionary and cutting edge scientific ideas were invented well before they were "quantifiable."

and so am i? He's right, psychology is never going to attain "global consistency of local experimental outcomes". But it's still considered a science for whatever reason, probably because one day it will be a de facto science, or simply because it employs the scientific method.

No.

It has it just as much if not more than other globaly accepted sciences like genetics where "x gene is found to do this" in one experiment then isn't so in next. Luckily we have this nifty little thing called statistics.

Statistics is one aspect of hard sciences that makes experiments repeatable, but that alone is not enough. If you want to extrapolate from isolated experiments to predict results in future experiments, you need hypothesized invariances. Is there any such thing in psychology?

Addendum: you need hypothesize invariances and hypothesized transformations of invariances from one system to another. These correspond to properties and homomorphisms in other contexts.

These criteria are somewhat arbitrary, as different sciences meet them to varying degrees. The clearest example is of course evolutionary biology, which hardly meets any. Astronomy is also similar in this respect. I suspect that people are simply biased against psychology, just as people were (and some continue to be for some reason) against biology. This bias likely stems from very little knowledge of the field. Have you yourself studied any psychology? I'm genuinely curious and am not trying to be snarky.

>If you want to extrapolate from isolated experiments to predict results in future experiments, you need hypothesized invariances. Is there any such thing in psychology?

I'm not familiar with these terms I'll admit but quick googling leads me to believe what you're saying is basically, does psychology have constants that hold true and whose changes can be predicted to be used in further experiments. If so then yes. Reinforcements no matter the manipulation will make the select behavior more likely. If I change how often the reinforcement is delivered I can reliably hypothesize the change in behavior based on how those changes of reinforcement acted in previous isolated experiments and these changes will still hold the basic elements of reinforcement.

>I'm not familiar with these terms I'll admit but quick googling leads me to believe what you're saying is basically, does psychology have constants that hold true and whose changes can be predicted to be used in further experiments.
That is correct.

You're talking about operant conditioning? What about in the case of traumatic bonding? I think reinforcement stops having the hypothesized change in this case.

It's okay to have exceptional cases though. What's important is that psychologists actually try to understand the exceptional cases and model them, again, with constants and predicted changes. I don't see this happening, but you may be more familiar.

The term "reinforcement" is very vague, and it can mean many different things in many contexts. Vagueness again isn't a problem, so long as psychologists tend towards clarifying terminology so experiments can be properly executed and tested to their limits.

>I'll google the terms you're using and pull an opinion out of my ass, right on the spot. then I'll post this as fact.

you are the fourth worst kind of Veeky Forums poster

Another addendum, this time regarding the vagueness of the term "reinforcement". I think what makes people discount psychology as a hard science is the perception that psychologists idealize vagueness. When I think "soft science", my mind immediately jumps to notions of vagueness.

I'd guess that people would take psychologists more seriously if they believed that psychologists strived to be more precise regarding their terminology and hypotheses.

What are number 3 through 1?

Nope. Not at all. I took a psych class in high school and general psych in college as an elective.
I mostly just have a brother majoring in psych and like any good big brother I like to tease him and berate him for everything so I make fun of psych to hurt him emotionally and make him feel like he's wasting his life.

Psychology is not so bad. I think people's idea of the field is based on very antiquated psychology, most especially psychoanalysis. As it stands today, psychology is of course a far less powerful science than physics or chemistry, but is it really fair to expect it to be as mature as those two? The mind is surely a very complex system, and one which we hardly understand. For now, psychology simply represents our best understanding of the mind. I doubt offhandedly dismissing the field will get us any closer to obtaining insight into how cognitive processes occur.

Nobody has tried to devise any real psychological systems since behaviorism died out. The cognitive revolution had a lot of potential in the 1960s but died out as postmodernists took over academia. Even biology has a rough idea of how life works through the central dogma (even its exceptions) and evolution. Psychology has nothing. It's all pointless stamp-collecting without even the one slightest redeeming quality of being replicable.

>The cognitive revolution had a lot of potential in the 1960s but died out as postmodernists took over academia.
This is very far from the truth. While some of postmodernism may creep into social psychology, cognitive psychology is very much alive and well. Moreover, behavioral psychology persists in spite of the rather precocious announcement of behaviorism's death.

>cognitive psychology is very much alive and well.
Just because a field can pump out thousands of garbage studies per year does not make it replicable. At least in molecular biology and medicine, there is some understanding of an interconnected organism the follows principles of biochemistry that links the knowledge gained in one study to another. Show me that the same thing exists in biology regarding models of memory, models of learning, and models of psychiatric disorder. There really is very little going on, and simply refocusing on neuropsychology as the mechanical engine for psychological phenomena doesn't do enough to tell us about the firmware guiding it all.

>behavioral psychology persists in spite of the rather precocious announcement of behaviorism's death
I was referring to the philosophy of psychology "behaviorism" dying out. I am not advocating for returning to the days of "behavior is the only thing worth studying" because that's clearly not true, but there really hasn't been any interesting developments about what psychology is and what foundations does it have in decades.

Sure, I don't deny psychology suffers from a number of shortcomings, among which are the poor studies which are published far too fast and the poor grounding of its theoretical models. But that has little to do with my point that postmodernism has not taken over psychology.

As for replication problems, this is not a problem which scopes only over psychology. If you care to read it, I've linked an article by Ioannidis (2005) which presents an argument according to which most published experimental results are false positives.

>faculty.dbmi.pitt.edu/day/Bioinf2118/Bioinf-2118-2013/Ioannidis-journal.pmed.0020124.pdf

>But that has little to do with my point that postmodernism has not taken over psychology.
"Postmodernism", "political correctness", "social justice", it doesn't matter. The blight of ideology has taken over the field of psychology, preventing it from shoring up its scientific shortcomings until it is fixed. Don't believe me? Read a textbook. I used to be a diehard liberal, but now that I became more conservative, I couldn't believe how many subtle digs towards conservative politics are injected into even an introductory psychology textbook.

>As for replication problems, this is not a problem which scopes only over psychology.

Psychology has, by far, the worst problem considering that the entire field is built upon the shoddiest scientific and philosophical foundations. Nobody knows what the endgame of psychology is to discover nor what it would take to get there. The field of psychology is suffering from a vast problem of (the lack of) imagination and method.

Physics has the laws and theories of classical mechanics, electromagnetism, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics to serve as the basis for how all matter and energy functions. Chemistry is constantly improving its models on atomic structure, molecular structure, bonding, molecular interactions, materials, reaction mechanisms, etc., to serve as a basis for understanding how forms of matter interact with one another. Even biology can somewhat take a reductionist hammer to its models of knowledge, thanks to the universal principles of chemistry and physics, to explain its own foundations of the central dogma and evolution.

Now, what does psychology have? It has nothing to explain what psychological phenomena is, and it has embarrassingly little foundations to explain how to study psychological phenomena on its own and in comparison to other psychological phenomena. It's pointless and insipid stamp-collecting suffering from egregious flaws in scientific thinking.

what about neuroscience?

>what about neuroscience?
Already addressed my opinions about neuroscience:
"There really is very little going on, and simply refocusing on neuropsychology as the mechanical engine for psychological phenomena doesn't do enough to tell us about the firmware guiding it all."
I don't hate neuroscience, I just don't think it can replace psychology, given that psychology is supposed to be the software to neuroscience's hardware.

If I had to be perfectly charitable, however, I would admit that cognitive psychology is, on occasion, capable of developing robust models about isolated kinds of psychological phenomena, like memory. That kind of comprehensive understanding allows us to make connections between neuroscientific findings and psychological models, like for example how hippocampal cells respond to epigenetic changes and how this could extend the period of "activated" memory encoding as described by psychological theories on memory.

What I just described is perhaps the most exciting kind of psychological research, because it removes some doubt that we aren't just aimlessly studying something totally unverifiable. But this kind of semi-rigorous research isn't performed nearly as often as it should be in psychology, and the field still seems limited to understanding particulars and not being able to figure out some sort of universal principles connecting each particular concept. Hence, unreliable stamp-collecting.

I don't read psychology textbook so I wouldn't know. But psychology doesn't happen in textbooks. Like any field, progress is found in articles.

Now, comparing psychology to physics is comparing apples to oranges. Again I would like to reiterate my point that your criticism of psychology is near identical to how biology was seen, especially referring to it as stamp-collecting. It's also something to point out that the value you attribute to biology is in how reducible it is to physics, which is far from how the field is evolving today. Biology is turning more and more towards systems science to offer a holistic rather than reductionist view of biological phenomena. The same will come from psychology. Reductionism is less and less attractive to researchers in these fields, and is the remnant of the physics-centric philosophy of positivists.

Psychology is psychology, its goals are to explain to the best of our ability the phenomena of the mind. Clearly, the field is young and requires further work, but its ideas are not as shoddy as you make them out to be. For instance, a large part of the field will consist in the study of cognitive mechanisms such as executive control, which deals with the inhibition of stimuli. These sorts of ideas have some explanatory value, and do connect to other areas of study, most obviously neuroscience. Are they fuzzy? Sure. Does that warrant an offhand dismissal? Not until a better model is proposed.

>Now, comparing psychology to physics is comparing apples to oranges.
This idiom never made sense. Why can't the two be compared? They both purport to discover facts about reality, correct? I understand that psychology will always have more difficulties accomplishing the same kind of

>Again I would like to reiterate my point that your criticism of psychology is near identical to how biology was seen, especially referring to it as stamp-collecting. It's also something to point out that the value you attribute to biology is in how reducible it is to physics, which is far from how the field is evolving today. Biology is turning more and more towards systems science to offer a holistic rather than reductionist view of biological phenomena.

You're misinterpreting what I've been trying to show. I never claimed that biology can be 100% reductionistic, but it does have a very strong reductionist core in which much of biology can be explained through complex biochemistry, whether it means discussing how genetic material is spread or how organisms adapt to their environments.

Psychology SHOULD be a systems science, but it is a science without neither reductionist principles nor a guiding system, and it has been like that for at least several decades. Like I said before, the field of psychology has an imagination problem, and I see no indication of it changing in the future if it has been comfortable churning out mostly garbage for the past few decades. Perhaps the student loan bubble will cause it to change, or perhaps molecular biologists and neuroscientists will get annoyed that there isn't much of a psychological framework to serve as a benchmark for their investigations of the brain. But I doubt the catalyst for better psychological research will come from psychologists considering they know too little philosophy and biology to dig themselves from the rut even if they wanted to nowadays.

Sorry, I got cut off earlier.
>Now, comparing psychology to physics is comparing apples to oranges.
This idiom never made sense. Why can't the two be compared? They both purport to discover facts about reality, correct? I understand that psychology will always have more difficulties accomplishing the same kind of experimental rigor, but at the end of the day, it's all either reducible to matter or an emergent property of matter.

You not heard of the free energy principle then?

fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/The free-energy principle - a rough guide to the brain.pdf

sci-hub.io/10.1038/nrn2787

Machine learning friend here. That "model" can be fit to (literally) random data, and it will still produce output that can fake being a good fit.
arxiv.org/abs/1611.03530

youtube.com/watch?v=NIu_dJGyIQI&t=123s

not the guy you are responding to

You haven't given a single argument to:
That psychology is not fulfilling its role as a science
That psychology is not progressing

What you've done is give a false analogy, pointing out flaws in psychology by comparing it to sciences that we can show are reducible to matter (none the less because of major breakthroughs).

Also those sciences had fundamental breakthroughs long after they were established, and the lack of one in psychology is something you purport to be a imagination problem(ie. we havent figured it out so we wont).

You're just shit flinging because you can hide behind other peoples work.

its alot more than fitting to data though. its a very well-constructed theory which fits to many many contemporary ideas about neuroscience and psychology. as far as im concerned it just suffers from similar problems that evolution seemed to suffer from when accused of being difficult to verify or a just-so-story. But those only really apply to evolution if you have an improper understanding of it like when people repeatedly spout "whats the evolutionary advantage of this and that". technically whats good about the free energy principle is that it isnt really a process theory yet. it simply describes constraints on what a system must do to look like it is alive. it technically doesn't need to be an explicit explanation for how brains work but brains that work in anyway will conform to the principle even if you can explain how the brain actually works in another way. it does seem to produce quantities though that can be matched to neurobiology and concepts in psychology though.

im not actually sure this paper really applies anyway

>You haven't given a single argument
Wrong. I've given many reasons defending my opinion why I think psychology is fundamentally flawed as a field in its current state. These reasons (paraphrased) include: institutional decline, a lack of imagination, a lack of foundations to establish a "systems science", a lack of universal connectivity between topics, etc. I've even provided examples of where it goes wrong and where it goes right. I've made quite the argument, no matter what your distress compels you to believe.

>What you've done is give a false analogy, What you've done is provide a dishonest argument. You either have no idea what you're talking about, or you're too butthurt to actually examine my ideas as I have stated and clarified them.

What I stated wasn't a "false analogy" because I never said that psychology ought to be conducted in the same fashion as physics, nor that psychological phenomenon is similar in quality to physical phenomenon. It was an attempt to demonstrate what other fields have that psychology does not.

In fact, I tried to provide a more obvious and less objectionable comparison to another field by bringing up biology, which has similar problems with reductionism and yet has managed to develop a robust system in which every discovery manages to "fit" into a general and unchanging picture of life and its machinery. i.e., biochemistry, energy, the central dogma, evolution, etc.

Psychology has none of those redeeming qualities that makes it less than a systems science. There are no foundations that lead to understand concepts that contribute to interconnected and long-lasting models of how the mind works. There is no "whole" that makes it holistic because there is nothing binding together events studied with social psychology with structures examined in neuropsychology.
The foundations are so weak that, even if models were to arise, we wouldn't know how to critique them or build upon them.

do you read alot of psychology or neuroscience?

>Also those sciences had fundamental breakthroughs long after they were established
Again, you haven't read a since thing that I wrote. There was a period when natural philosophy began to transition into what we would now recognize as the physical and life sciences. I would argue that psychology abandoned the systematic transition halfway through the process and is now stuck in limbo thanks to institutional mediocrity.

>you purport to be a imagination problem(ie. we havent figured it out so we wont).
Straw man argument. You don't even know what I mean by "a lack of imagination" or why I think it has persisted in psychology departments, and you're acting as if it is the only reason why I believe that psychology as a field has stagnated. Do you know what I normally say to stuck-up cunts like you? Ironically, "not an argument".

>You're just shit flinging because you can hide behind other peoples work.
And you're a cocksucking faggot who can't argue in good faith because what you're hearing genuinely bothers you. I'd like to imagine it's because you're a psychologist who feels threatened by the lack of legitimacy that I point out, but I doubt you're even smart enough to handle the rat race that involves conducting a non-replicable experiment and then figuring out how to best market your bullshit findings with the catchiest buzzwords. Go be a cunt somewhere else.

I study neurobiology at Harvard University. For fuck's sake, I took my intro. psychology class under Steven-fucking-Pinker. Of course I do.

Is that nebbishy teacher's pet as insufferable as he seems?

then how have you never heard of free energy?

>Is that nebbishy teacher's pet as insufferable as he seems?
Idk, I liked his lectures, even though they could be kind of dry. I didn't really interact with him often. I almost wish that I took the fall intro class with Daniel Gilbert because I heard his lectures were really entertaining.

I don't know. Probably because it's still kinda fringe but I think it's interesting and it's the kind of systems thinking that should be promoted in psychology. I'm glad somebody brought it up to me because I felt for a long time that nobody was trying.

Reminder that psychoanalysis will win in the end :^}

& |: /\ }

Fixed for you.
>>>

>At least in molecular biology and medicine
>Physics has the laws and theories of classical mechanics
>>Now, comparing psychology to physics is comparing apples to oranges.
>This idiom never made sense. Why can't the two be compared?
>but it is a science without neither reductionist principles nor a guiding system

Maybe you?
>even biology

All of those are comparisons.

>It was an attempt to demonstrate what other fields have that psychology does not.
That is the point. They are not comparable because psychology does not have a known foundation that defines it unlike all the things you are comparing it to.

> comparison to another field by bringing up biology,
Which still isn't comparable because we know a fuckton about the basics of biology. We know what makes up enzymes or whatever and what the different parts do. We even know why those parts function the way they do because of chemistry.

Ill admit i dont have the best vocabulary, i dont go to college, or understand what you mean when you use certain terms, but you're the one who is a stuck up cunt, is genuinely bothered, and using catchy buzzwords.

You dont want people to understand what you mean, you just want them to agree. Thats not something i want to be any part of so i'm done.

>All of those are comparisons.
I never denied making comparisons. I even prefaced my comparisons with disclaimers in order to reinforce my point more effectively. Is making comparisons automatically fallacious? Of course not.

>That is the point. They are not comparable because psychology does not have a known foundation that defines it unlike all the things you are comparing it to.
>Which still isn't comparable because we know a fuckton about the basics of biology. We know what makes up enzymes or whatever and what the different parts do. We even know why those parts function the way they do because of chemistry.
WOW THAT IS EXACTLY MY FUCKING POINT YOU DENSE MOTHERFUCKER. And here you are having the nerve to criticize random shit while missing the purpose of it all, only to... listen I just don't have the patience for this shit. Learn to fucking read and argue.

>Ill admit i dont have the best vocabulary, i dont go to college, or understand what you mean when you use certain terms, but you're the one who is a stuck up cunt, is genuinely bothered, and using catchy buzzwords.
Dude, you're throwing out random fallacies that you don't even understand, and you didn't make a single attempt to understand what I was saying before trying to tell me off. That kind of ignorant and pathetic behavior genuinely bothers me, as it would for anybody interested in having a serious discussion.

>You dont want people to understand what you mean, you just want them to agree. Thats not something i want to be any part of so i'm done.
Fuck off you whiny cunt. Learn to read before you accuse people of "not making arguments".

Just look at him. His beard. His forehead. His nose. His pose. His cigarette. His clothes. I mean just fucking look at him.

That's a cigar.

not the guy you were responding to but i don't think that what you define as a science is what we should use as a measuring stick with which we measure the degree to which something is scientific. If a discipline was to use the scientific method to try to understand something i would say that it is then a science. Psychology uses experimentation that can be replicated and deduces using the scientific method just as any other science does, so why is it that it would not be considered a science like the others?
also, dont be so mean to the other guy, the foundation of thinking scientifically is that we are open to having our ideas challenged so if you intend to carry on to doing research in neurobiology id hope you wouldnt treat any critics as you did this user.

>not the guy you were responding to but i don't think that what you define as a science is what we should use as a measuring stick with which we measure the degree to which something is scientific. If a discipline was to use the scientific method to try to understand something i would say that it is then a science. Psychology uses experimentation that can be replicated and deduces using the scientific method just as any other science does, so why is it that it would not be considered a science like the others?
I think that, ideally, psychology could easily be a rigorous science that approaches the level of predictability and replicability as, let's say, biology. The problem is that discoveries aren't treated alone in a vacuum, they have to cohere with other "facts" or they risk being nigh useless after further examination. Either they're confirming the current metamodel or they're disproving it.

Unfortunately, psychology doesn't have a solid enough foundation to even begin talking about a holistic model of the mind, let alone comparing several options or having a predominant view to serve as the standard. For a science that requires intense systems thinking, it is a terrible flaw in imagination that limits the usefulness and validity of what comes out of psychological research.

>also, dont be so mean to the other guy, the foundation of thinking scientifically is that we are open to having our ideas challenged so if you intend to carry on to doing research in neurobiology id hope you wouldnt treat any critics as you did this user.
I don't treat my critics like him because most of my critics aren't aggressive knuckledragging morons who accuse me of "shit flinging behind other people's achievements" and claim that "I never made an argument", despite me writing several paragraphs explaining what I believed and why.

I don't suffer rude fools well, and I never understand why I'm the person criticized when I never start fights, only finish them.

You didn't finish that argument moron you just kept handwaving like you're still doing. You will always win in your echo chamber. It shows you are full of yourself.

>You didn't finish that argument moron you just kept handwaving like you're still doing. You will always win in your echo chamber. It shows you are full of yourself.
Because providing a rebuttal is a counterargument, right? It's clear as day to anybody who isn't indoctrinated stupid that psychology has severe foundational issues that handicap it from functioning like other sciences, even like its closest "structural" relative biology. Go be miserable somewhere else if you're just going to be a stuckup cunt instead of writing a proper response to the painful BTFO that you just received. And quit samefagging, too, it makes you look pathetic, especially after doing quite a lot of handwaving yourself to avoid addressing ways in which psychology strays from the scientific method.

There's no need for discussions on psychology to degenerate into personal attacks. Yesterday's debate was far more civil.

you're delusional bud

I fight fire with fire. Sue me. If people want to attack me because I dare question that the field of psychology could be better, then so be it.

Not an argument.

>I fight fire with fire. Sue me. If people want to attack me because I dare question that the field of psychology could be better, then so be it.
Fine, but no points are actually made using ad hominems. I don't see the point of a debate consisting entirely of fallacies.

None of my argument relied on "ad hominem" fallacies. That was me getting frustrated and calling him an asshole for acting like an asshole when I was finished making my point. The argument of my interlocutor, however, relied almost exclusively relied on misrepresenting my argument and abusing the "fallacy fallacy", since they never applied in the way he thought they did.

For the life sciences, its only real science if the paper has a genetic component, or some mathematics that isnt statistics

> The problem is that discoveries aren't treated alone in a vacuum, they have to cohere with other "facts" or they risk being nigh useless after further examination.
how do you mean, do you mean to say that new facts of psychology have to abide by already established facts or risk being deemed invalid? if so, this is not the case. In fact this is very contrary to the sensationalism around psychology, thinks that directly challenge what we already know in psychology pick up the most attention.
>Unfortunately, psychology doesn't have a solid enough foundation to even begin talking about a holistic model of the mind, let alone comparing several options or having a predominant view to serve as the standard.
but in fact there is an established understanding of many functions of the mind. Of course there is not yet a complete understanding of every function of the mind as it pertains to behavior and experience, but there is a clear movement towards understanding more about the mind holistically. Because the human experience is so complex, however, we cannot simply have an organized push towards one great understanding, which is what i think you want when you say that it lacks imagination. Because human behavior exists in many different realms there must exist people that seek to understand those realms so that when we connect our widely spread understanding of various elements of behavior and experience a clearer picture starts to form. In other words psychology is often narrowed for the individual pursuing it and this serves what you seem to feel is the endgame, a holistic understanding of the mind, quite well, due to its complexity.

second part got cut off
On the second part about treating someone else nicely, if someone is acting poorly you do not act poor back and then say that your behavior is justified by theirs. for someone of your academic rigor this should be infinitely clear. just as when a toddler kicks your knee you dont kick them back, you dont meet irrational insulting with more insulting.

Psychology doesn't need to be a science.

Engineering isn't a science either. It's an applied discipline that uses elements of science, but it's not purely scientific.

different branches of psychology are "more strictly scientific" than others
general psychology (think currents of thoughts like gestalt psychology, behaviourism etc) for example is a hard science, through quantitative experiments it aims to discover the parts of the mind that work the same way in every normal individual
it has been like this for quite some time, since John Watson published an article on a journal and founded behaviourism in 1913
social psychology is a softer science, in that it doesn't only use quantitative scientific experiments and it doesn't concern itself about how things work under the hood - for example social psychology will tell you that social pressure is real and what it does, or how altruism is much more dependent on situational causes than on personal dispositions
neuroscience is a field that bridges different disciplines, among which there are psychology and physiology, and physiological psychology uses physiology to understand what in the brain translates to what behaviour/attitude/emotion/...
>psychology is not all concerned with the brain
physiological psychology is relatively new but it is a discipline and a science
look up any paper by Burrhus F Skinner on pidgeons' learning, the skinner box, operant conditioning...
there's a lot of (complex) foundations about how the brain does certain things, you may use those if you will
newton's laws were formulated a lot after the birth of physics as a science, while psychology has been around as a science since 1879
>psychology does not have this
depends on the field - general psychology has this and it's an important part, social psychology and dynamic psychology don't have that and as you stated don't aim at that
while most psychology research today is a mess, a portion of real/serious psychological studies obtain quantifiable results, and they're not about reading thoughts in the slightest

in the grand scheme of things I personally feel we can't have that, because who knows how humans will have changed hundreds/thousands of years from now
keeping our feet on the ground yes, (general) psychology claims - and it's been shown to have, all those hard words
surely a lab experiment can't account for all of the things you will find in a person's life, but in pretty much every condition, a sane person will, for example, be susceptible to operant conditioning
>traumatic bonding
that has nothing to do with conditioning, and if you were referring to the wikipedia article, know that it's (likely) written by someone who didn't really know what he was talking about
there's a list of "exceptions" to how operant conditioning works, for example discrimination, generalization, overshadowing, backwards and forward blocking, now I'm forgetting a couple but these are all that's been found in the last 80-some years of study, and they apply pretty much everywhere, everytime to everyone
also >The term "reinforcement" is very vague, and it can mean many different things in many contexts.
in this case (conditioning and behaviourism more in general), reinforcement is an award of something enjoyable (positive reinforcement) or the subtraction of something painful/dislikeable (negative reinforcement)
it's the opposite of punishment, the meaning of which is straight-forward at this point
a lot of the terms used in psychology aren't exclusive to psychology (some do, think cognitive dissonance, law of effect, operant conditioning, ...), but have specific meanings in the context in which they are used
again, sadly, research in psychology today is a mess and these terms I'm thinking/talking about are often disregarded because the goal is to come up with something sensational that journals and magazines will publish
not all psychology is strictly interested in "how cognitive processes work", but I do wholeheartedly agree with the rest

>trying to devise any real psychological system
>behaviourists
behaviourists thought that for psychology to be a real science, psychological processes should not be studies because the means to study them were not there
now we have neuro-imaging
moreover, cognitivism exists and with that the replication of a number of cognitive processes/functions has been tried using computers
>models of memory
see Baddeley, 1986, 2000, 2007
>models of learning
see Skinner, whatever on conditioning
>models of psychiatric disorder
alright we don't have those
we're making progress though, together with neurophysiology/neuroscience
>how many subtle digs towards conservative politics are injected into even an introductory psychology textbook
are you, by any chance, from the US?
the only psych textbook I've read that had some overly politically correct stuff in it was translated from english, written by two US authors

>see Baddeley, 1986, 2000, 2007
>see Skinner, whatever on conditioning
>alright we don't have those

Misinterpreted what I meant to say. There is no integrated understanding of how one concrete psychological function relates to another as part of the mind in the same way molecular biology, medicine, and evolutionary development ties into one another in biology. Not understanding how memory, learning, and psychiatric disorder play into one another is a failure of psychology.

In addition, there's no real solid and widespread understanding of what a tentative theory of the mind should look, from a software and hardware perspective to use the computer analogy, like across psychology departments and certainly not covered much as a psychology undergraduate. Good psychology is both parts scientific (in such way where it is well-defined, well-structured, and informative) and parts philosophical (but in such a way in which it establishes good foundations and doesn't ask scientific questions), and yet these basics are missing from nearly all psychology degrees that I know of.

>we're making progress though, together with neurophysiology/neuroscience

The thing is neuroscience and neurophysiology isn't the only thing to learn when it comes to psychology. Psychology could be the top-down approach, making observations and speculating inwards as far as we can, and neuroscience could be the bottom-up approach, dissecting individual components of the brain and observing their functions. Towards understanding the mind, both are invaluable, but the psychology side has been somewhat bankrupt for a while, definitely stagnant while the more neuroscience-oriented folks have been making breakthroughs.

>the only psych textbook I've read that had some overly politically correct stuff in it was translated from english, written by two US authors

Yes. I used an introductory psychology textbook written by two Harvard professors, one who routinely teaches an intro. psych course.

No respectable psychologist admires or even likes Freud. He's one of the major reasons other fields look down on psychology as well.

>Psychology could be the top-down approach, making observations and speculating inwards as far as we can

Isn't that what is being done? Or has been done? Arent Freud or Jung perfect examples of how that introspection fails, where either it's just wrong, or too abstract to meet neurobiology?
Is this related to what you mean by lack of imagination? If so how could that change?

Im not the guy you are responding to but am the one you called a cunt earlier. I am sorry my reading comprehension and writing is not college or harvard level, so that is going to be a hurdle for me.

Maybe this isn't relevant but;
I realize i do not know the current state of psychology beyond whatever i can read on the internet, but i do understand (anecdotally) how psychologists and therapists operate mostly on projection or guesswork, often based on philosophies they form themselves or pick up elsewhere. I do not think that is acceptable, but I am completely unaware of an (existing) alternative.

I hate psychology because I don't like being analyzed by brainlets.

By projection i mean putting yourself in other peoples shoes, but that was probably clear

>Isn't that what is being done? Or has been done? Arent Freud or Jung perfect examples of how that introspection fails, where either it's just wrong, or too abstract to meet neurobiology?
Freud and Jung are failed examples, at least to the extent where they propose falsifiable theories, but they're interesting examples that pointed us towards psychological phenomenon in themselves, such as the existence of the unconscious and the importance of drives and emotions. There's a lot of tantalizing stuff there, though, in how they try to explain why people do the things they do, so I don't write them off totally though I don't consider them part of modern psychology. We should be making more systemic efforts like Freud & Jung, but with a more scientific and less dramatic approach.

>Is this related to what you mean by lack of imagination? If so how could that change?
Somewhat. Psychology is a systems science in desperate need of a system, or at least some clear methodology to integrate a particular phenomenon into a system and to compare proposed systems. The problem is that nobody knows where to start across psychology departments. Good psychology is both parts scientific (in such way where it is well-defined, well-structured, and informative) and parts philosophical (but in such a way in which it establishes good foundations and doesn't ask scientific questions), and yet these basics are missing from nearly all psychology degrees that I know of.

>Im not the guy you are responding to but am the one you called a cunt earlier. I am sorry my reading comprehension and writing is not college or harvard level, so that is going to be a hurdle for me.
I think your reading and writing level is fine, and I'm perfectly willing to answer criticisms and questions. I just don't like it when I take time to explain my position that people say "I never made an argument" and that "I'm talking shit".

>Maybe this isn't relevant but;
I realize i do not know the current state of psychology beyond whatever i can read on the internet, but i do understand (anecdotally) how psychologists and therapists operate mostly on projection or guesswork, often based on philosophies they form themselves or pick up elsewhere. I do not think that is acceptable, but I am completely unaware of an (existing) alternative.
That makes sense. Let me put a better alternative: psychology is guesswork, but it could be more organized and systemized guesswork like in biology. I think it's maddening that, for example, we have trials for anti-depressants that don't place enough focus on individual "brain"/"psychology" profiles, since we're already coming across evidence that there are multiple types of depression that are characterized only by similar symptoms. That means that entire swathes of people are missing out because the sampling approach in a few key trials wasn't up to par.

A revolution in systems thinking within psychology could solve this because we would be able to understand how the different components of psychology, such as behaviorial, cognitive, neuroscience & genetics, social, etc., meld into one another, allowing us to construct better profiles to dissect the root causes of psychiatric disorders such as depression and understand the unique profile of a given patient or of common classes of patients.

sorry for the bad formatting, let me fix it:

>Maybe this isn't relevant but; I realize i do not know the current state of psychology beyond whatever i can read on the internet, but i do understand (anecdotally) how psychologists and therapists operate mostly on projection or guesswork, often based on philosophies they form themselves or pick up elsewhere. I do not think that is acceptable, but I am completely unaware of an (existing) alternative.
That makes sense. Let me put a better alternative: psychology is guesswork, but it could be more organized and systemized guesswork like in biology. I think it's maddening that, for example, we have trials for anti-depressants that don't place enough focus on individual "brain"/"psychology" profiles, since we're already coming across evidence that there are multiple types of depression that are characterized only by similar symptoms. That means that entire swathes of people are missing out because the sampling approach in a few key trials wasn't up to par.

A revolution in systems thinking within psychology could solve this because we would be able to understand how the different components of psychology, such as behaviorial, cognitive, neuroscience & genetics, social, etc., meld into one another, allowing us to construct better profiles to dissect the root causes of psychiatric disorders such as depression and understand the unique profile of a given patient or of common classes of patients. That way, we can actually have the "holistic" thinking that people praise psychology for, which currently isn't there in any meaningful sense. And desu, it is going to be very difficult for that to occur because most psychology departments are not equipped to teach their students of how to embrace that kind of thinking without retooling themselves extensively, thus it is an institutional problem.

>That means that entire swathes of people are missing out because the sampling approach in a few key trials wasn't up to par.
Again I've left something out, let me rewrite this.

That means that, when a prospective treatment fails in trials, entire swathes of people are potentially missing out on a new treatment that is perfect for their type of depression because the sampling approach in a few key trials wasn't up to par.

>we have trials for anti-depressants that don't place enough focus on individual "brain"/"psychology" profiles

holy fuck that hits so close to home. i have had that thought ever since i went to treatment when i was 16, and got put on prozac, then switched to nortryptamine, then abilify, etc, like they were playing darts in a pitch black room hoping to hit the board. Glad i stopped. (also Abilify was 20$ A PILL)

And now my cousin who is 17 and was on the highest dosage of cymbalta, had suicidal thoughts for the first time, so they are tapering to prozac, then off completely.

Sorry for that little autism spurt but i've never heard someone tangentially touch on my disdain for how ssris and the like are used. Though that's not what you were saying.

Anyway, Ill have to come back to read over this again because im starting to struggle with my ability to keep focus, but i really appreciate the second chance to hear what you had to say. It's given me some things to learn about (systems science, systemized guesswork like in biology), and some fun stuff to think about, like how psychology could pull it off or what it might look like in the future.

>Sorry for that little autism spurt but i've never heard someone tangentially touch on my disdain for how ssris and the like are used. Though that's not what you were saying.
I mean, it kind of is. Just from a different perspective. I think the way we currently treat depression is a disgrace built upon this foundation of ignorance, and I hope we'll move further from the "preferred SSRI" + "some form of rigorous therapy" as a catch-all for patients.

>Anyway, Ill have to come back to read over this again because im starting to struggle with my ability to keep focus, but i really appreciate the second chance to hear what you had to say. It's given me some things to learn about (systems science, systemized guesswork like in biology), and some fun stuff to think about, like how psychology could pull it off or what it might look like in the future.
No problem, I'm glad you gave me the second chance, since it helped me explain what I have been feeling in a way that wasn't like a lot of the standard "hurr hurr psychology no science method" kneejerk criticism. I apologize for the scuffle we had earlier, I didn't have to be that rude.