|
WHAT IS IT TO BE SCIENTIFIC?The scientific method is used by scientists to find out about the world. It has brought humanity huge insight into the natural world and has helped us develop powerful technologies, from space ships to vaccines.
Moreover, sciences attract great respect from the public and funding from companies and governments. So, it’s worth asking whether Psychology is a science or not.
Psychologists often decide how scientific a piece of research is by asking whether it is reliable and whether it is valid. IS IT RELIABLE?A reliable procedure should always work the same way whenever you use it, and should produce the same results every time it’s used on the same people.
For example, an interview is reliable if you always ask the same questions, in the same way and in the same order. If you change the way you word the questions for certain people, or even just change your tone of voice or body language, you might make the interview unreliable. In general, research is reliable if it is well-designed with standardised procedures that can be replicated accurately. It is unreliable if the researchers have to make on-the-spot decisions, use their imagination or bring personal bias into the study. Even if research is reliable, that doesn't mean it has to be valid... IS IT VALID?A valid procedure gives true results because it’s studying what it’s meant to be studying.
For example, a valid IQ test really will measure your intelligence and only your intelligence. A lot of IQ tests are invalid because you can get extra points for being well-educated, having a lot of general knowledge or coming from a certain background – things that don’t necessarily have anything to do with intelligence. In general, research is valid if the behaviour being studied is natural and realistic and not influenced by outside factors. Research becomes invalid (and un-scientific) if there are lots of other possible explanations for the results that are just as plausible as the one being offered.
A valid test automatically has to be reliable… but just because a test is reliable, that doesn’t automatically make it valid. DOES IT TEST HYPOTHESES?
Science is often described as more than just a focus on objective, reliable and valid research. It is a particular way of understanding the world that follows a distinct procedure. This is the hypothetico-deductive model.
This procedure involves beginning with a research question from which a hypothesis is formed; this hypothesis is tested empirically (with physical evidence) and from this a theory is formulated: the theory then produces more questions, more hypotheses and more testing. 
Let's get it right. You have one HYPOTHESIS but several HYPOTHESES. There's no such word as 'hypothesises'
IS IT EMPIRICAL?
Empiricism is the idea that true information comes to us through the 5 senses: stuff we can see, hear, touch, taste and smell. Empirical facts are physical facts: they are backed up by physical evidence and can be measured in an objective (unbiased) way.
Science is an empirical discipline. Hypotheses have to be tested against the facts to see if a theory can be formulated. If the physical facts contradict a theory, it will have to be changed or scrapped. A problem for Psychology is that some psychological subjects don't seem very empirical at all: thoughts, memories and feelings cannot be observed or recorded and don't leave physical evidence, One solution is to stop researching these things. This was the view of the Behaviourist school of Psychology in the 20th century. Behaviourists like B.F. Skinner argued that psychologists should study behaviour (which can be observed) and the environmental stimuli that cause learned behaviour, not thoughts. Cognitive Psychologists insist that mental processes can be studied in a scientific way, even if they are unobservable. After all, there are things that the natural sciences study that cannot be directly observed (eg gravity, black holes, the Big Bang). The Biological Approach suggests that, even if thoughts and memories cannot be observed, changes in brain states can be observed with new brain scanning technology. If there is a link between mental processes and brain states, then this might give us empirical evidence for theories about thought and memory. IS IT FALSIFIABLE?
A key idea in science was developed by Karl Popper. Popper pointed out that the best scientists do not try to prove theories; they try to disprove (falsify) them.
This is sometimes shown with the example of swans. You might think all swans are white, but it only takes the appearance of one black swan to disprove that theory. 
In order to be considered scientific, Psychology should offer falsifiable theories. These would be theories that could be proved false... but haven't yet. If there's no way for a psychological theory to be falsified, then it isn't really a scientific theory.
For example, many believe that humans think and feel because they have souls that live on after they die. This might be true, but it's not a scientific theory, because it can't be falsified. Souls can't be seen or touched and they can't be detected with equipment and recorded or measured. This is why psychologists prefer to focus on concepts that are falsifiable, like memory stores or conditioned behaviour, because these ideas are falsifiable. 
Not scientific.
IS IT TOO REDUCTIONIST?
The belief that science is the only way to discover truths is called positivism, but not all psychologists are positivists. Some would argue that science is not the best way to understand human experience. They would argue that it's not just difficult for Psychology to be fully scientific, but it's wrong for it to try.
This is because science is reductionist. Reductionism means reducing everything to the simplest possible explanation: bare physical facts, numbers, the brain. It involves taking things apart and looking at what they're made of, but missing out on the bigger picture. Some people would say humans are more than just blobs of biochemistry and brains or bundles of conditioned behaviours. Human experience is much more complex than any dots on a graph can show; this is why we have art and poetry and music to get across what "aggression" or "memory" or "fear" is like. The opposite of reductionism is holism. Some people argue that Psychology needs to be more holistic because human beings are "more than the sum of their parts". However, holistic psychological theories are, by definition, much less scientific. |
|
APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY TO THE ISSUE OF SCIENCE
|
|
An introduction to hypothesis testing
|
Monty Python satirizes the hypothetico-deductive model
|
FALSIFICATION
Popper's ideas about falsification are important for psychologists. It is often said that Freud's theories are unfalsifiable: the id or the ego can't be challenged with evidence; there's no way of disproving the theory that they are responsible for aggression. Popper argues that theory that cannot be disproved is not a scientific theory.
However, Freud's ideas aren't completely unfalsifiable. For example, Freud believed that watching aggression would be cathartic, reducing the pent-up aggression in the unconscious mind (a bit like "letting off steam"). This is the sort of idea that you could try to disprove. And, sure enough, Bandura's Bobo Doll studies showed the opposite taking place: children who watched an aggressive role model showed more not less aggression.
This would seem to falsify part of Freud's theory, but in a way that's not a bad thing for Freud, because it means that Freud's theory must be partly scientific.
Another example would be Burger's replication of Milgram's study. Now in fact, Burger's results were consistent with Milgram's Agency Theory, which strengthens the theory. But they could have falsified it if lots of participants had refused to obey the orders from the authority figure to give a 165V shock. This shows that Agency Theory is falsifiable (even though it hasn't actually been falsified yet) which suggests it is a proper scientific theory.
This would seem to falsify part of Freud's theory, but in a way that's not a bad thing for Freud, because it means that Freud's theory must be partly scientific.
Another example would be Burger's replication of Milgram's study. Now in fact, Burger's results were consistent with Milgram's Agency Theory, which strengthens the theory. But they could have falsified it if lots of participants had refused to obey the orders from the authority figure to give a 165V shock. This shows that Agency Theory is falsifiable (even though it hasn't actually been falsified yet) which suggests it is a proper scientific theory.
REDUCTIONISM
In their attempts to be scientific, psychologists sometimes go too far in breaking down human experience to its component parts, missing out on the "big picture". Another aspect of this is focusing on quantitative data at the expense of qualitative data.
This criticism is often leveled at the Cognitive Approach. For example, Baddeley's memory studies focus entirely on scores in a (rather strange) memory recall test and Schmolck et al.'s study on semantic memory uses picture cards rather than personal memories. Theories like Working Memory break memory processes down into smaller sub-processes, like the Visuo-Spatial Sketch Pad or the Phonological Loop.
The Biological Approach is also criticised for treating humans as "meat machines" whose thinking is governed entirely by the laws of biology. For example, the study by Raine et al. (1997) can be accused of viewing human morals entirely as brain functioning (though Raine would deny he is taking such a simplistic view).
Gestalt Psychology is a school of Cognitive Psychology that rejects reductionism and tries to study mental processes in a more holistic way. Reconstructive Memory is an approach that has more in common with Gestalt Psychology than reductionist theories like Working Memory. Schemas are a very "Gestalt" idea because they suggest that we reconstruct memories "as a whole", using our expectations to fill in the gaps, rather than recalling each separate detail of an event or an image.
This criticism is often leveled at the Cognitive Approach. For example, Baddeley's memory studies focus entirely on scores in a (rather strange) memory recall test and Schmolck et al.'s study on semantic memory uses picture cards rather than personal memories. Theories like Working Memory break memory processes down into smaller sub-processes, like the Visuo-Spatial Sketch Pad or the Phonological Loop.
The Biological Approach is also criticised for treating humans as "meat machines" whose thinking is governed entirely by the laws of biology. For example, the study by Raine et al. (1997) can be accused of viewing human morals entirely as brain functioning (though Raine would deny he is taking such a simplistic view).
Gestalt Psychology is a school of Cognitive Psychology that rejects reductionism and tries to study mental processes in a more holistic way. Reconstructive Memory is an approach that has more in common with Gestalt Psychology than reductionist theories like Working Memory. Schemas are a very "Gestalt" idea because they suggest that we reconstruct memories "as a whole", using our expectations to fill in the gaps, rather than recalling each separate detail of an event or an image.
|
EXEMPLAR ESSAY
|