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Is Psychology a Science? - Psych Discussions – Transcript
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- Zach compares psychology to biology because a significant amount of biology is wrapped up in it, such as psychopharmacology.
- William James stated that psychology was just an elaboration of the obvious and only the hope of a science.
- The group discusses various criticisms of psychology as a science, including changing clinical treatments, fads, and the replication scandal.
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everybody goin good look at this how everyone's dressed up quite well very good welcome to my home I'm dr. market Alan and we thought we would shoot a Halloween series of episodes and so we're all in costume I
am Steve Jobs and I will try to sell you Apple products there have it maybe everybody could go on around and introduce themselves and say what they're just like I'm will and I'm dressed like Clint Eastwood from the good the bad and the ugly I'm Zach and I'm dressed like David as pumpkins I'm Annie and I'm dressed as a pumpkin I'm
Ashley and I'm dressed as a celestial witch and I'm Mattie I'm a banana so we thought we would talk today about spooky topics in psychology and so the first is is psychology really a science yes or no and so would anyone like to get us started
it is psychology of science or is it not a science well Zach please get us going yeah I think whenever you're trying to decide whether something fits into a category like this that's defined by just one word it has to be relative there's things like Poli Sci where you literally can't do experiments because it's impractical and would be unethical and there's also things like biology were basically all you do is experiment
so I think it's much closer to biology in my opinion because there's so much even if you use biology as a as an example there's so much of that wrapped up in it and things like psychopharmacology well that was John Watson's goal was to say that psychology was a branch of the Natural Sciences but yeah other thoughts I I think it is a science I mean it's you know study the mind you know I think that yeah obviously it's
kind of there's some biological stuff going on there and I just the thing I avoid one of the things I voice or why it's psychology is not a science there's nothing set in stone it's a lot of theory know stuff like that well science is just the same way as well like that just because it has slightly more you know they think that they have more evidence a lot of science is not set in stone so I don't see any difference personally with that and then also I mean you still have like experiments you have independent variables dependent there is
stuff like that you know that are transacted both so I absolutely think psychology is a science for sure I feel like you know I hear that sometimes it's psychology isn't a science but if that's a better question to ask is what would make it not a science because you're doing you're coming at the mind from a scientific perspective using hypotheses you're using experiments like the only
thing that I think separates psychology from the other science Sciences is the subject matter which is the brain and like if you don't believe that the brain is a thing that can be studied then I feel like you're behind a few years well you know let me go back a few years to because William James who is an early psychologist said he said he said two things he said one that psychology was
just an elaboration of the obvious and he also said that psychology wasn't a science it was only the hope of a science and so the question I teach history and systems and one of the questions we ask is have we really gone beyond that sort of a thing so since we have several scientists here no good we're going to say something I I do think it's a science I can see where
people might not think it's a science I think like maybe like the the Rawls like religion comes and and like talking about like the mind or like versus like solar and like all that personality stuff it's just so hard to understand when like I think a more like traditional way viewing it like back in the past is like not not seeing it so much as like the mind is what controls everything of what you are
but it's something else inside of you or like it's like your soul maybe room and that's really hard to explain but in my opinion I do think it's a science because I think like I actually said you're really approaching it it from a lot of like scientific perspectives so in my mind it definitely the science so what do you think you can agree with
everybody or yeah yeah well I just think like it's hard to argue that it's not a science because like we do empirical research all the time in psychology and we're constantly trying to learn more about the brain and doing different experiments to find out we do this what will happen if we do this what will happen so it's hard for me to like wrap my head around how it wouldn't be a
science like we are studying something and we are doing research with that so well let me get asked this question I got it good yeah Zak well the process matters this using the scientific method and everything is a huge part of all of this but science is all about determining what's true and what also matters as results and I think in the world where psychology is not scientific
we haven't learned anything now that we didn't know before the study of psychology was a thing and we know a lot more now we are much better at treating things like new disorders even if we're not perfect at it yet well wrenching off of that one of the things that you had said before about psychology just being an elaboration of the obvious and I think that we've definitely gone beyond that I think there's a lot of studies
that have come out from psychology where we're just blatantly surprised we're like I didn't know humans worked like that you know and it's apparently and I feel like for the results section of being a science like we have had we have found things through psych she that have predictive value that can tell us like how people are going to respond to different things how certain treatment will interact with different
kind of people I think that's very valuable and something that is worth having so like yeah I don't know where I was gonna end well I think it's ironic that the person with a PhD is the one who's saying psychology is not assigned but I think that one of the criticisms is that psychology changes every 30
years that it was studying so the earliest psychologists the structuralist and the functionalists were studying things like perception and then it becomes behaviorism so that's all we're studying we're running rats through mazes and then it's the cognitive revolution in the 60s and so then we're studying decision making and that sort of thing but it's and the way we if we think in terms of clinical treatment
that changes all the time - and that things go through fads so one minute it's everyone's a psychoanalyst and it's frayed and the next minute it's cognitive behavioral therapy Erin back and Albert applause but isn't that part of science you learned to ask better questions like I'm not a biologist or a computer scientist and can't really speak to the other sciences but I would
assume that they have changed over time as well and psychology as a science is a very it's a relatively new science you know people have been studying animals and studying like the human body and studying things like that for simply discovered them you know I would say medicine in particular is full of fads oh yeah most people consider medicine to be a science mm-hmm especially when they're
sick we're all about even like like the solar system Pluto Pluto is a plane right how long and now it's things like that I mean conversations of maths nature um last year that blew my mind they were talking about like the foundational theorems of mathematics and how they haven't been proved like
they're not actually proven they're just like well if we assume this then we can assume every other thing that math has ever produced like math is not certain what certain the one thing you could depend on as I guess it is true well what I tell my students is if you're looking for truths then you shouldn't be taking a psych class you can take class for your religion and I that's the line
from risky businesses if there was any justice in this world truth to be a four-letter word instead of a five-letter way let me throw this out to my advisor in graduate school used to say that we never actually resolved anything in psychology we just move on to another question and so I don't know that that that's accurate either the there was the the replication scandal in psychology within the last couple years
too and so maybe it's all it's like as they say in counseling it's progress not perfection are there thoughts about whether psychologies assignments I think that's a good way to that's it well I hope this wasn't too spooky and we'll say happy Halloween and thank you for
joining us oh we want you to please subscribe like and comment below on whether you think that psychology is a science and thanks for joining us very good