ITT: How do we fix psychology?

Neuroscience might give some definite insight on the working of psychological concepts, but things such as personality development and psychosocial mechanisms are ultimately on the realm of psychology instead of neuroscience.

They'd complement each other rather than replacing each other.

not true. not true at all.

neuroscience and psychology are interdependent. neuroscience is only valid if it can explain psychological phenomena and we need to have theories of that phenomena to be able to have something to explain. they co-evolve to some degree.

Also, understanding the brain on its own wont necessarily help to understand the how of specific psychological phenomena which are dependent on complex environmental development. The brains output is negligble without the environment that surrounds it.

Also, i don't see how understanding the brain more will make psychology more predictable or less complex. We can understand underlying reasons for psychological phenomena but understanding the brain wont suddenly make personality studies more reproducible. their problem is complexity, not necessarily lack of knowledge. understanding the brain still poses the same problem of confounding or unaccounted variables. Modelling from the point of view of the brain might just introduces more degrees of freedom.

I always thought it would be interesting to do an experiment, taking two people from birth, and placing them in separate identical rooms, no color, minimal bland food, and seeing how their individual personalities develop. Would they grow up with similar personalities? Kind of taps into the question of how much of our personalities are nature vs nurture.
Then, in subsequent experiments, with new subjects, start to control variables of the living conditions. The changes would be seemingly meaningless, for example changing the color of the room or the type of food the subject is given. This would investigate the ways in which the seemingly arbitrary parts of life actually effect the development of youth.

>that autistic writing
Please write properly. Quality of posts is extremely important to this community.

For one, humans don't work that way. They'd need a social environment for them to develop their personality properly and that is very difficult to replicate if we tried.

Second, we already have identical twins as living experiments for this sort of thing.

>I know mang, but they are still not quite developing as well as I hoped.

I think one issue is that its hard to do both at the same time. trying to do both at the same time (psychology + neuroscience) produces a more complicated problem than looking at either of them on its own. And don't forget, neuroscience also has its own problems just like psychology.

>It doesn't really know what it is talking about
How do you mean? it is a well defined construct and has proved useful in other areas of neuroscience or psychology. It doesnt have to be the only model of personality, but it has relevance.

I think your jungian idea is just as bad. your collections of definite types is pretty much the same as defining arbitrary dimensions. in truth its always going to be arbitrary. youll never get non-arbitrary divisions. its similar to the race problem. people have arbitrary labels of race which aren't scientific. but then again, genetically, humanity varies in a continuous fashion across the globe. No one has the exact same DNA. its the same with mental illness. there will be no non-arbitrary dimensions.

Dont you think also, that as is the nature of this continuity, your collections of personality types can be reduced even more into separate dimensions along which everyone varies. the big 5 is separated into smaller dimensions as well infact.

>an intricate study of an individual's personality
this is far too difficulty to do systematically. and in the end, youll just be extracting traits which are just as criticiseable as the big 5. the big 5 atleast has predictive value. Also, dont think the big 5 just came out of nowhere. it was built up over decades of research and was derived statistically using factor analysis which as a method, naturally reduces and abstracts things to predicting factors.

teach me how to write then

Completely amputate it from the humanities. Throw psychoanalysis to the wind. Throw cultural psychology to the wind. Throw counseling psychology into the wind.
If you ever wish legitimatize psychology, as something than poorly applied philosophy, you need to sanitize it of every retarded phantasmic sub-discipline.
Biopsychology, and Evolutionary psychology are the only fields worth study.

>I'd say a biological aproach like those in evolutionary psychology or ethology would be interesting in tracing the development of the instincts, as well as their evolutionary functions. It would also add a lot more objectivity for psychology by having it linked with biology, which can be extended to neurology and sociology, which are highly complementary to psychology.

That is a very tall order.

>They'd need a social environment for them to develop their personality properly

Do you have any decent papers on this? I immediately thought of Genie from the 70's.

The answer involves the following:

Abandon the notions of hypothetical constructs and other mentalsitic explanations to behavior: so no invoking "the mind" to explain behavior, no using constructs like "the memory model" either. This allows psychology to focus on observable behavior as opposed to unobservable notions, circumventing the problem of psychology not being falsifiable.

Doing this lets us to greatly minimize the use of inferential statistics, which causes a vast number of problems when trying to perform experiments such as allowing people to keep adding to their sample until they get results that are "significant." In contrast to this, an inductive method should be implemented that relies on how an organism performs rather than what statistics say as we would have clear data that is based on behavior rather than on hypothetical constructs. Doing this also better allows us to extend psychology to animals.

Physiological aspects of psychology can say, so long as they are not like evolutionary psychology which attempts to assert that behavior is derived from evolutionary past as opposed to current environmental factors (this isn't saying that genetics don't play a role, rather that the environment plays a much larger role; sure genes might influence behavior, but the behavioral changes related to those genes will not occur unless the organism is exposed to the right environmental factors). Physiological aspects of psychology are fine as long as they explain how behavioral phenomena works rather than why it occurs (such as how organisms evolved to become susceptible to operant conditioning.)

tl;dr: Just extend behavior analysis to the rest of psychology.

>I think one issue is that its hard to do both at the same time
Not really. They complement really, really well. There are many interesting experiments we probably haven't tried yet. For example, a evolutionary comparison between different animal brains and their respective behavior might've been quite fruitful, though nobody did it yet.

>Dont you think also, that as is the nature of this continuity, your collections of personality types can be reduced even more into separate dimensions along which everyone varies
Not really. The personality types are identified in the personalities of other people rather than being created or assumed arbitrarily.

The dimensions of the Big Five, on the other hand, don't have any real basis for their existence, which makes it a completely arbitrary system with no other purpose besides fitting people in baseless categories. My main complaint is that it concludes that Neuroticism (which is basically unhappiness) is a permanent trait on a given individual, which is obviously not true since everybody has oscillations on their Neuroticism. Even Extraversion is changeable on people depending on the situation. It's just not right to assume people have definite unchangeable personality traits, since in reality they are highly variable. In the end, it explains nothing about personality.

>this is far too difficulty to do systematically.
Not really. In my view, all that is needed to understand the development of someone's personality are the events that occured on their lives and their reactions to them. As far as I'm concerned, personality traits are born from an outside stimulus and stay as long as they are needed, eventually turning into a permanent part of the personality later. This should be enough to help identify where those personality types start and where they develop through someone's life.

See Hollow's experiments on rhesus monkey's behavior when they're raised isolated from their peers. Search about feral human children too, if you're not convinced.

>I think one issue is that its hard to do both at the same time
Not really. They complement really, really well. There are many interesting experiments we probably haven't tried yet. For example, a evolutionary comparison between different animal brains and their respective behavior might've been quite fruitful, though nobody did it yet.

>your collections of definite types is pretty much the same as defining arbitrary dimensions.
Not really. The personality types are identified in the personalities of other people rather than being created or assumed arbitrarily.

The dimensions of the Big Five, on the other hand, don't have any real basis for their existence, which makes it a completely arbitrary system with no other purpose besides fitting people in baseless categories. My main complaint is that it concludes that Neuroticism (which is basically unhappiness) is a permanent trait on a given individual, which is obviously not true since everybody has oscillations on their Neuroticism. Even Extraversion is changeable on people depending on the situation. It's just not right to assume people have definite unchangeable personality traits, since in reality they are highly variable. In the end, it explains nothing about personality.

>Dont you think also, that as is the nature of this continuity, your collections of personality types can be reduced even more into separate dimensions along which everyone varies
Indeed, there are variations of the personality types, much like how there are varied subtypes in the typology of personality disorders. There might be slight variations, but those can still be traced to a main archetype.

>this is far too difficulty to do systematically.
Not really. In my view, all that is needed to understand the development of someone's personality are the events that occured on their lives and their reactions to them. As far as I'm concerned, personality traits are born from an outside stimulus and stay as long as they are needed, eventually turning into a permanent part of the personality later. This should be enough to help identify where those personality types start and where they develop through someone's life.

>though nobody did it yet.
Yes they have.
At the moment, we know so little about the brain, it doesn't really add too much to psychology studies. Studies that really try to go into depth and advance our understanding of the brain are often too complicated to directly apply to psychological stuff.

>the Big Five, on the other hand, don't have any real basis for their existence

They are though. They were derived from statistical analysis of natural language terms that people use to describe eachother and themselves. Its therefore got a basis in empiricism. The same you might use in identifying personalities in people.

The way you talk about changeability, I feel like you're misunderstanding what the big five is. Neurotic people can be happy you know. And introverts can look out going around certain people. People can have variable behaviour and long term personality traits too. Plus, it's well known that the big five changes across a lifetime also.

>Not really.
Yes really, its very difficult and requires alot of time and money to do a qualitative case study on one person about their life. This seriously impedes research. This is especially with longitudinal studies (that observe people across their whole life) and without a study being longitudinal, you can't be certain about the events that affected someone's life.

Indeed, though I'd add that simple psychological models/constructs can still be valid if they are completely supported by observed evidence.

I believe a definite categorization of subjective concepts such as emotions, instincts and desires can be created. And by extension, a definite model of the human mind capable of explaining and even foreseeing human behavior.

I agree, though psychology is still pretty compatible to sociology. Things such as value theory may be very relevant for the study of personality development, for example.

>I believe a definite categorization of subjective concepts such as emotions, instincts and desires can be created. And by extension, a definite model of the human mind capable of explaining and even foreseeing human behavior.
There is no need for any of this and no reason to believe that humans even have a "mind." Such concepts are simply used to explain behavior when there are no other known explanations and because of this, are unnecessary to a scientific field.

We are able to explain human behavior by simply looking at one's environment (and to an extent genetic history, but as I said, this part isn't as important). We don't need a model for the human mind to do this nor do we need to categorize emotions when we can just observe everything that occurs before and after a behavior in order to determine its cause (its more complicated than it sounds).

>The Cerebrotonic

FUCK. FUCK. FUCK. At least all those acid trips gave me something...right?

>Yes they have.
Right. I guess it's just a matter of time then.

>They were derived from statistical analysis of natural language terms that people use to describe eachother and themselves.
Exactly. The basis for the Big Five's factors has shit to do with how personality actually works or how it should be organized at all. As I said, it is more in the realm of sociology than psychology for sure.

Plus, it's well known that the big five changes across a lifetime also.
That's a relief, though it kinda defeats the whole point of the Big Five in my opinion. If people are that changeable, then there's not much point in defining their traits.

>Yes really,
There are cheaper ways to do this. Like reading a biography or simply asking people to explain their lives. It might take a while to create a vast and detailed collection of personality types, but as long as it keeps expanding, it's fine.

>There might be slight variations, but those can still be traced to a main archetype.

you're making the same mistake alot of people did in biology when studying species - you assume there is an archtype and people are variations of it. But really, variation is the norm with a tendency to cluster. It's called population thinking, and you should look it up.

The typology of personality disorders is one thing i disagree with and think is quite arbitrary. Especially with subtypes. You can construct your own subtypes very easily, thats how arbitrary it is.

Human personality varies immensely and continuously; there maybe causes to these variations but there cannot be objectively discrete categories.

Can't disagree more.

You must be trolling.

>he never heard of behavior analysis
>he disagrees with a scientific analysis of behavior
This is why people think psychology isn't a science.

I haven't really studied but as a neurodiverse individual I just have some extreme resentment toward it for some reason. Probably just the application. And the fact that it's another human analyzing you.

I've been psychoanalyzed before and it was a failure. They wanted to determine if I wanted to kill everyone at my school. I got the pass by being totally honest. I told her how much I hated my drunk mom and my stupid teachers and that school goes way too slow and I've been held back for no reason. But that I have a full ride to college and I just made a joke to my friend's mom who's an idiot and yes I am miserable but I'm almost done.

Little did she know I really was starting to go over the edge like two years prior. If it weren't for my own stubbornness to remain completely passive toward everyone I really would've killed everyone and it woulda been hella easy.

Checkmate atheists

>Exactly. The basis for the Big Five's factors has shit to do with how personality actually works or how it should be organized at all. As I said, it is more in the realm of sociology than psychology for sure.

No, the big five doesn't tell you the cause of personality, that's research that is ongoing and done by many groups. But it is valid and reliable statistically. The big five are not drawn from thin air, they were made by interviewing or testing people and doing statistical analysis on their answers. You can argue that the methods of finding out about people aren't ideal, but the analysis is robust.

>There are cheaper ways to do this etc.

I just don't think its worth it unless you're looking for specific groups or specific phenomena. With something as broad as personality traits in general, you'll be generalizing and abstracting over many groups that you'll probably end up with simple concepts that are more obtainable with simpler methods, rather than having to perform massive qualitative analyses which by their nature are also less generalizeable, less reliable.

And btw, the methods you describe are actually far more associated with sociology than psychology.

What's the difference between psychology and sociology then?

>If people are that changeable, then there's not much point in defining their traits.
Says the one complaining that we shouldn't define peoples behaviour as being unchangeing *okay then*.

I agree with your way of thinking. Though you shouldn't expect to be able to tell the response of an individual to a certain occurence without counting in the underlying personality it has built over the course of its life.

The personality is modeled through emotional impressions, which can be categorized indeed. To count in the personality of the animal, it might be necessary to create a "mind" model to construct the personal aspects of the individual (personality) in interaction with his innate aspects, thus forming his "mind".

Tell me what behaviour analysis is then.

Being is too abstracted to ever be fully ground in empirical studies that are insanely accurate, repeatable and useful across a lot of domains

this problem cannot ever be circumvented without cutting yourself short somewhere

A field of science dedicated to analyzing the behavior of humans and other animals. This alone doesn't explain much, so it might be more useful to explain some of its core assumptions.

Behavior analysis assumes that all behavior is caused by something outside of the organism (outside meaning not due to "itself" or other free will based explanations) known as environmental causes. Environmental causes can range from something like "a loud noise" to "not eating for 10 hours." In other words, this is saying that behavior analysts believe in determinism rather than free will.

An example of a notable achievements of behavior analysis would be its discovery and application of operant conditioning (most people should have some idea what this is, if not then positive reinforcement is an example) to many different environments both in experimental and applied settings (behavior analysis is great at treating developmental disabilities, drug addictions, and obesity, among other things).

Behavior analysis also assumes that one does not need mentlistic explanations to explain behavior (no need for concepts such as the mind when you can look into the environment for the cause of behavior), this is generally why behavior analysts clash with other paradigms of psychology (see Chomsky and MacCorquodale for an example of this).

>No, the big five doesn't tell you the cause of personality, that's research that is ongoing and done by many groups. But it is valid and reliable statistically.
It may be stastistically reliable, but that's useless if it doesn't know exactly what it is examining. I really doubt it will be able to truly add a good contribution to psychology.

>I just don't think its worth it unless you're looking for specific groups or specific phenomena.
It's a big deal if you consider you can use it to predict which personality types are created in response to a certain environment or so. This might also help us predict how certain personality types can be avoided or how they can be developed. It might take a while, but a categorization like this would prove very fruitful.

>What's the difference between psychology and sociology then?
Yes, they overlap very much when we start talking about what makes people different from each other.

>Says the one complaining that we shouldn't define peoples behaviour as being unchangeing
Indeed. Though, in my case, I'm taking that part into account.

If you replaced personality with environmental history, you would be correct. Personality is a hypothetical construct meant to explain behavior without actually explaining it, while one's environmental history is based off of observable events in one's past that can influence behavior (EX: if you were shocked after turning on a light switch, you may be more likely to avoid turning on that light or going into that room in the future.)

>that's useless
Its not useless if you can use it to study things like mental illness, if you can do studies about genetic or environmental correlations/causes of them or you can use it in neuroimaging studies. What are your studies going to do that's different to explain what you're examining. You're doing the same thing - correlating behaviours together to extract factors.

>It's a big deal if you consider you can use it to predict which personality types are created in response to a certain environment or so.

That's a different line of research i'd say; where you'd need to know the types apriori. You can do that with the big 5 already.

But there is a non-linear relationship between your environmenal past and your current behavioural tendencies.

So what do you think about attention or working memory or visualising things with your mind or your mental voice?

>attention
A concept used to explain behavior without actually explaining it. In order to explain this behaviorally, you need to break each component of "attention behavior" into behavioral parts, such as: eyes are looking towards the item in question, they are performing correct writing behavior (in a school setting), they are not performing any behaviors that reduces the likelihood they perform the behaviors listed, etc.

>working memory
>implying congitive psychology isnt a meme
This is a problem with psychology that I described here . Working Memory doesn't actually do anything to explain behavior without invoking circular reasoning: "How does memory work -> it goes through working memory -> how do we know that -> because they are able to perform X behavior on a given test -> how do we know that proves working memory exists -> because the model says thats what working memory is able to do...."

>thinking related concepts
Behavior analysts generally don't deny that thinking exists, they just describe it as behavior as opposed to the causes of behavior and like other behavior, can be influenced by the environment. The only difference with thinking is that it is much more difficult to observe someone doing it (its considered internal behavior). Granted, there is a debate in behavior analysis as to whether or not we need the assumption of internal behavior, but that isn't important right now.

>there is a non linear relationship....
Explain what you mean by this.

>
You could say that, but I still think the Big 5 is unreliable due to its lack of real psychological explanation and for the fact that its data is naturally way too changeable. The fact that more and more psychological researchers use it kinda upsets me now. Also, let me guess, Neuroticism is the most highly correlated with mental illness, isn't it?

For attention, what about covert attention which can't be observed behaviourally?

For working memory -

Yes i see your point but can't you posit an underlying construct with predictions from this type of behaviour? What would you call that construct? Just another behaviour?

And one thing is that, say you gave someone a task where they had memorise numbers and after a delay say them - you won't posit mental concepts for how they keep that information in their head during the delay?

And if not, what about concepts that are spoken of in terms of brain activity during that delay.

Furthermore, if the person can do this task without the response in the end - that is, without the overt behaviour - surely, the construct cannot be described in terms of behaviour. Yet the construct is still valid because there is still neural activity where the "delay" is, even if there is no response at the end of the delay.

Okay, just said all that and saw your last paragraph but won't delete.

Isn't internal behaviour exactly the same as a mental concept? Doesn't internal behaviour cause external behaviour? (in the sense that the brain causes the body to move).

>non-linear

I mean that people react in different ways to their environmental histories such that you can't always predict someones behavioural tendencies from their histories.

>lack of real psychological explanation

Irrelevant to reliability. And many psychological constructs lack a satisfying explanation.

>data is naturally way too changeable

I don't see how off the top of my head.

And yes, neuroticism is.

Require repeatability before any study is accepted just like with any other science. Don't allow subjective non falsifiable terms or ideas to entire the sphere of psychology either.

>It doesn't matter
Yes it fucking does. Being able to repeat a study is extremely important or else you don't know if it's bullshit or not. Notice how Biomedical has the same problems too?

Covert attention would have the same problems as working memory, we don't really have a reason to assume that it exists as there is no benefit in doing so.

For working memory, we wouldn't call the construct anything, we would say that there is no reason to assume that it exists and that the phenomena it explains can be explained through external environmental factors instead.

Its important to note a distinction between thinking and hypothetical constructs like working memory; to behavior analysts, thinking is really just speaking (or engaging in verbal behavior) internally. There isn't any construct used to explain or bridge concepts regarding internal behavior that don't also apply to external behavior; so someone thinking "1, 2, 3, 4, 5...." would be effectively the same as someone saying it out loud (minus physical differences between the two). We wouldn't say that one goes through a hypothetical process and the other doesn't.

As for your last paragraph, that is where the debate comes in (at least for the first sentence). Some behavior analysts see no reason to assume that thinking as a concept is needed at all because there isn't a discernible difference between it and other mentalistic concepts. In behavior analysts, internal is traditionally described as behavior that can only be observed by the individual performing it, but this concept has the problem when considering external behaviors where only one person can observe it (doing yoga in your room alone for example). The "can only be observed by one person" part creates problems with mentalism.

The second sentence is much simpler to explain, the brain allows for behavior to occur, but it doesn't cause it. An easier way to think about this is that you have an hands that are able to grab things, but you won't actually grab anything unless there is a reason for you to do.

Is there a real reason why psychology shouldn't just be evolutionary psychology? What is the point of other subfields when a biological approach is the only really scientific one?

>I mean that people react in different ways to their environmental histories such that you can't always predict someones behavioural tendencies from their histories.

For all intensive purposes you can (assuming you have reasonable knowledge on their history). While environmental histories differ, the laws of behavior stay the same, even with patients with serve disabilities, positive reinforcement can be used to increase desired behavior (Fuller, 1949 shows this). The difficult part with reinforcement comes with finding something that can serve as a sufficient reinforcer (anything that increases the likelihood of behavior).

If anything, evolutionary psych is the least scientific area of psychology. Most of it is just unfalsifiable speculation.

Evolutionary Psychology invokes many of the same problems as other fields of psychology and should not be confused with physiological psychology. Behavior analysis does a much better job explaining how people behave and does so in a scientific way, a way that does not rely on deduction from non-observable constructs or inferential statistics.

>to behavior analysts, thinking is really just speaking (or engaging in verbal behavior) internally
This seems like a bold assertion. Is there much evidence to support it?

>environmental history
Looks interesting, though I searched about it and nothing came up at first. Are you making this concept up? Besides, it's tradition to just refer to it as personality.

I bet any results that the stastistics may show will be either obvious, unproductive or superfluous for psychological explanation.

Also, forget the thing about changeability. It doesn't really matter at all now that I think about it.

Evidence in natural cases is a better way of proving psychological phenomena desu. But yeah, as long as nothing akin to that
hidden unconcious/subconcious bullshit is implemented again.

Behavior analysts conclude this based off of the lack of evidence to support the existence of any other more complex theory of thinking. From this perspective, there really isn't a reason to assume that thinking is more complicated. To answer your question, there really isn't evidence of this, but that is only because there is no evidence of any other internal explanation for thinking either and at that point, behavior analysts are just using Occam's razor.

That said, this idea is in part the basis of cognitive behavioral therapies which is just applying behavioral concepts to thinking/emotions as well as to external behavior.

>
I didn't say it doesn't matter. I just think that in the long run and over a vast many studies, it is a smaller barrier than people think to scientific progress. When people think about replication alot, to me, they are thinking too much about experimentation and not enough about the construction of theories which is a real driver of science also. I think replicability doesn't matter so much because theories will draw evidence from many many different types of studies and I think this minimises problems of replicability in some sense. If replicability was that important, we wouldn't have gotten so far with psychology or neuroscience.

I also query as to what it means when they say psychology studies aren't replicable and why. I'd need to read into the study.

Look up the term "ontogenetic history" instead, I am simplifying things so it is easier to understand.

It's very difficult to control the psychological environment of a organism. The closest we can get to replication is having the phenomenon occur naturally once again and have it noticed.

>behavior analysts are just using Occam's razor.
They're not, though. They're replacing one assumption with another.
One experiment I find interesting is that people who only speak a language that doesn't have words to differentiate between particular colours can still differentiate between those colours when tested (I forget the exact methodology; something to do with comparing threads of different, but similar, colours). This seems hard to reconcile with the assertion that people only think verbally.

If it's not replicable, it's not science.
That doesn't mean scientific study is the only valid method of study. But it does mean we have to stop pretending psychology is science if it continues to struggle to replicate important studies.

Then stop calling psychology science. You can't have it both ways. We can't pretend psychology is valid science while also insisting replicability is too hard.

Assuming this person could still see, they could simply be discriminating against different shades of the same color without needing to label them. Animals are able to behave different when different color stimuli are presented (assuming they have been paired with a reinforcer) and generalization (behaving in the same way to differing stimuli) can occur across different colored stimuli, with colors similar to the original stimuli producing stronger effects on behavior than those more different.

I should really emphasize that behavior analysts do not believe that thinking causes behavior (or any internal construct for that matter). They believe that thinking is a behavior itself that is controlled by the same factors as other forms of behavior.

I guess I'm just uncomfortable with the bold assertion that all thinking is verbal. But many fields have little quirks like that which tend to get ironed out eventually. I don't expect behaviour analysts to believe such an assertion in, say, 50 years time for instance.

By your shitpost, you're also implying Biology and Ecology aren't sciences since they derive evidence from observation most of the time instead of replication.

Pathetic.

Biology/ecology are generally split between actual predictive, replicable science and stamp-collecting. If you're trying to lump psychology in with stamp-collecting, that's fine.
Can you imagine a biologist proposing a model for cellular replication that mysteriously only works in his/her lab and then claiming that people are focusing too much on replicability? They would be laughed out of academia. Apparently, though, that's a perfectly acceptable practice in psychology.

>Does it use the scientific method?
>Yes, it's a science.

Problem with psychology is that there are too many normies and stacies, not cut out for thinking scientifically and applying scientific thought to the field.

To fix psychology, psych majors should be required to take General Chemistry & General Biology courses, Organic Chemistry, and General Biochemistry. This will weed out all the fat and improve the field greatly.

If someone wants to be a social worker (Most people call these professionals psychologists), the program should be Sociology.

Theres always a benefit to constructs if they have predictions.
Tbh, I don't see how you can explain working memory or attention through external factors, though they do have empirical demonstrable evidence.

One thing is neural activity. You haven't addressed this.

Well, I still don't agree with behaviour analysis at all and it seems like an ultra-outdated idea to me.
I view the brain as a model of the world; a simulation, so we have internal representation you can call mental in this idea. And if you think about it, the only way we can view our own behaviour is through the mental in a sollipsistic sense. Wouldn't you agree? Even if you didn't call that a scientific statement in a behavioural sense ;)

Verbal behavior isn't simply anything that is verbal, its a term that describes any behavior the is controlled by the behavior of other people (speaking is a common example, but it is far from the only form of verbal behavior).

theres not even a real definition of science and no discrete demarcation of what is science and not which isn't subjective. its a social institution with variable methods. areas of biology are less scientific than psychology. its just immature to argue about science in this way and it has no real benefit. you're naive also just to use binary replicable/non-replicable

I disagree. Theres so much evidence that environmental events impact people differently and unpredictably, notably seen in theories of motor development using dynamical systems theory. I'm taking this from a paper, where the author says you regularly see those at high risk that respond well therapies and those at low risk with very bad outcomes and its all to do with great complex interactions between the environment and the individual.

Statistically we can identify effects across populations, but when faced with an individual its incredibly difficult to predict their outcomes.

>theres not even a real definition of science
yes there is, please stop spewing such nonsense

Psychology is good as is. It isn't perfect, but keep in mind that it's a new science. It has had nowhere near as much time to develop as have the physical sciences.

Sociology on the other hand, no clue what the fuck happened to that discipline

So, let me get this straight. Your argument is that psychology is scientific if you choose to use a very loose definition of science?

What do sociologists even do?

>Yeah, there are people and these people from here feel this way about this thing. Statistics show that this many people in a sample size of 500 feel this way.

>I bet any results that the stastistics may show will be either obvious, unproductive or superfluous for psychological explanation.

explain yourself if you wish to. i dont see a reason for you to say that except that you like your own ideas better.

Then you didn't get what I mean. Psychology, much like ecology and sociology, must derive evidence from observations in the natural environment. For example, we can check the psychological implications of child abuse when it happens ocasionally.

Besides, psychology is a special case of science since everyone is actively experiencing what it does all the time. Everyone can verify the existence of Cognitive Dissonance, for example, by memory alone.

I wouldn't take him too seriously; hes using ideas that are about 80 years old and hit a brick wall back then.

If it's not replicable, just don't call it science. It's that simple.
I'm not saying psychology isn't a worthwhile area of study. It just annoys me that psychology tries to leech off of the prestige of actual science by pretending to be actual science. You might think this is harmless, but it actively harms public perception of real sciences by association, which can have real-world negative effects.

Behavior analysts wouldn't try to explain either of those concepts, simply because behavior analysts do not believe they actually exist. Behavior analysts are generally against the deductive form of reasoning used by cognitive psychologists to draw their conclusions regarding concepts like working memory and instead favor a more inductive approach where one gathers data first and then draws their conclusions about a phenomena (rather than making a theory and then using data to support/debunk it).

Neural activity explains how behavior occurs, but it does not explain why it occurs. As I said earlier, someone can have hands and having hands allows for people to grab items. But that person will not grab any items unless there is an environmental reason to do so (EX: they have not eaten in 12 hours and there is food in front of them, so they may grab that food). Just having hands doesn't automatically mean the person will grab.

Because people have been exposed to different environmental factors throughout their lives and those factors affect how they will behave in a given situation (this is also why behavior analysts often deal with smaller sample sizes than other fields of psychology). Behavior analysts actually do quite well in predicting the behavior of individuals by looking into that individuals (or animals) environment by trying to determine antecedent events for behavior and the consequences of said behavior and altering those to produce desirable changes in behavior.

The better question regarding that authors conclusion is whether or not the individual (in the sense of having a "self") is necessary component to explaining behavior beyond what has happened to that person in their past.

what is it then? have you read any philosophy or history of science?

no, im not saying anything, you're just walking into a brick wall talking about an issue which really doesnt matter. its more important to talk about making psychology more replicable (which i think you cant at the moment because of its complexity) than talking about shit like whether its a science or not which has no effect on anything except your ego.

Honestly, it's just what most of my experiences with it felt like, but I can't say that for sure. I'll take it that it is not useless, if only a bit lacking on its foundations.

Also, yes, I do consider my ideia more applicable in the field.

If it doesn't matter whether we call psychology a science, why are you so adamantly defending its status as science?

how does it leech off the prestige of actual science? and so many other areas of science have replicability issues, even chemistry. No area of science is completely replicable and i dont think replicability should be the best mark of science when this virtue is given to it on the complexity of the subject matter and not the method that is used. is cognitive neuroscience a science?
People know shit about science in general anyway and i guarantee, most people dont think of psychology as a science anyway so youre safe.

>what is it then?
science is the study of phenomena using the scientific method, what else would it be?

> have you read any philosophy or history of science?
plenty

You know you can replicate most psychological concepts with your own thoughts and feelings, right?

Also, you missed the point of the thread. We were supposed to be thinking on how to fix psychology as a serious science.

Behavior analysis is still alive and well and is used to great effect to help the developmentally disabled, drug addictions, obesity, animal training, and a variety of different social problems. Do not confuse modern behavior analysts (known as radical behavior analysts) with methodological behavior analysts; methodological behavior analysts assumed that internal concepts such as thinking, a sense of self, ego, etc. existed but could not be studied scientifically. They took a dualistic approach regarding mentalistic concepts, asserting that the concepts were seperate from each other, where modern behavior analysts believe that both internal/external behaviors are affected by the same laws of behavior.

Fortunately, behavior analysts are able to replicate their results quite well. Pic related is an ABAB design, where the behavior analysts records the baseline rate of behavior then implements the treatment, then removes the treatment to determine whether the treatment was causing an effect on the behavior. Note, that this is an extremely idealized graphed and the data usually isn't this perfect.

>You know you can replicate most psychological concepts with your own thoughts and feelings, right?
>We were supposed to be thinking on how to fix psychology as a serious science.
Why are you talking about fixing psychology as a serious science while advocating for self-reporting as a means for reproducibility?

Not just that, he is advocating going back to introspection. A garbage form of psychology utilized in the 1800s.

The failures of psychology as a pseudo-science are becoming more widely known. This harms the overall reputation of science, which can have serious effects on public perception, which can cascade into public policy and public funding of sciences. Psychology masquerading as real science is not harmless.
>and so many other areas of science have replicability issues, even chemistry. No area of science is completely replicable
You're deflecting. Replicability issues are much more pronounced in psychology than any other field that calls itself scientific. This calls all (yes, all) conclusions drawn from psychology into question.
>People know shit about science in general anyway
Oh, you're right. We shouldn't hold psychology accountable for its replicability issues because the general public are stupid. Why didn't I think of that?

I was actually just joking since it really seemed like you were merely shitposting.

>inb4 merely pretending

>We were supposed to be thinking on how to fix psychology as a serious science.
My whole fucking point is that it is not a serious science (at least not as practised currently). So the most significant improvement we could make would be to either drop the pretense of psychology as a science entirely, or put our big boy pants on and do some actual science.

It confuses me that you can believe attention doesn't exist even though you can experience it personally. Do you actually believe what a cognitivist would call attention doesn't actually exist inside your head? or are you just disagreeing with the construct? What if i said, attention was actually a type of behavioural construct (because it does have empirically verifiable data)

And, wouldn't the environmental reason be encoded in the brain? e.g. a long term goal.

> different environmental factors

I mean, people with the same histories reacting differently. What you talk about with reinforcements and animals is different i'd say because that is extremely simple behaviour as opposed to personality.

im not, im criticising you for butting in on a thread which has nothing to do with psychology's status as science.

Yet all your replies have tried to justify psychology's status as a real science.

Show me some studies because I actually don't believe you that they've done this so recently.

ive actually seen these types of graphs before because i work with rats in reinforcement learning.

Any meaningful work in psychology not captured at the level of the organism and its biology is reducible into "data science" somehow broadly defined. Big 5 has meaning in that it is essentially an exercise in unsupervised learning that has proven very replicable. Specifically, it is useful as a model of personality that explains the maximal amount of response variability in the sparsest number of latent variables (i.e., "personality dimensions").

Anything else in psych is either scientifically intractable/poorly defined or pseudoscientific. Psychology is often a steaming pile of shit, but it would be less so if people stopped trying to peddle poetry and creative writing as science. Jung and Freud were brilliantly creative and inventive man, but they were not scientists. Attempting to reconcile their kind and later psychodynamic/humanistic/existential thinkers with the science of brain, perception, and behavior is and will always be a shit show. By definition, explorations of human consciousness in the subjective sense are not proper objects of scrutiny by the scientific method. Science can categorically say nothing about these things similarly to the fact that a hammer cannot calculate the first 1000 digits of pi. This doesn't discredit the value of science or the hammer, but empasizes the value of knowing their proper use.

Answers that are verbally satisfying, but logically lax, are the source of a lot of grief in psychology. It is a perfect case study in why both superior verbal and quantitative reasoning are necessary for the healthy conduct of research. Otherwise, you just end up hurling words around without saying much of anything.

I would say that attention is really just a term you use to describe a constellation of behavior as opposed to something that exists as a construct inside your head. This then leads to the question as to what behaviors constitute attention behavior and what don't, but in an applied setting, this isn't a huge issue as long as the person starts engaging in those behaviors more often.

There is no reason for one to assume that environmental reasons are encoded (at least not as a useful way of explaining behavior) as opposed to simply just describing which environmental factors lead to which behaviors.

No one has the same environmental history, even slight changes can lead to differences in behavior.

As for your comments on animals, I recommend watching this document show casing Skinner and one of his grad students teaching animals to perform "complex" behaviors such as "self awareness" as a means to debunk those concepts. Alternatively, you can just read this to get a summary.

youtube.com/watch?v=QKSvu3mj-14

robertlanza.com/self-awareness-in-the-pigeon/

my point is that youre talking about this a black and white issue when it isnt.

It really doesn't draw all conclusions in psychology in to question. you're being extremely naive. Theres plenty of robust phenomena in psychology and robust theories.

Ive said before, i actually want to read the papers on this more because im convinced that these back and forth arguments about replicability are far oversimplified.

Here is one from 2007.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1885411/

ABAB design is a pretty core design of behavior analysts (there are other designs like multiple baseline design, alternating treatment, etc.), a large number of studies in JABA use them (granted a lot of these aren't free, but if you are working in a lab with rats, you should have access to JEAB.)