Controversies (scientific status)

Question 1

What does it entail psychology with scientific status?

Answer 1

• psychology is often defined as the science of behaviour and experience. The term science refers to knowledge based on systematic and objective methods of data collection that can be replicated to demonstrate the validity and reliability of results.
• science aims to discover natural laws in order to predict and control the world (e.g. build dams, create vaccines, treat schizophrenia). The method used to gain scientific knowledge is called the scientific method - explanations are proposed and then research conducted to test the validity of such explanations.

Question 2

What are the benefits of psychology being a science to society and the economy?

Answer 2

• The use of a scientific approach in psychology is important because people might claim, for example that men are more aggressive than women or that a certain drug cures depression - but people quite rightly demand evidence to support such claims.
• for this reason, in the 19 century, early psychologists sought to create a science of psychology in order to produce verifiable knowledge as distinct from common sense or armchair psychology.
• using evidence based data makes the research more useful to society both ethically and economically - ethically because it would be wrong, for example, to give people a drug for depression without having some certainty that it is effective.

Question 3

changing nature of ‘science’

Answer 3

• science may be seen to be something that is static but actually it has been changing over thousands of years, going back to early Greek thinkers.
• the Greeks proposed the idea that science should be evidence based (empirical). since that time there have been many difference developments in the process of science, improving its objectivity and validity.

Question 4

The methodology of psychology

Answer 4

• the second recent change in psychology has been in the methods that are used.
• Psychologists sought to quantify behaviour and have used quantitative methods which permit statistical analysis. This is sometimes classed as a nomothetic approach which aims to formulate general laws of behaviour based on the study groups of people. It attempts to summarise the differences between people through generalisations.
• In contrast the idiographic approach focuses on individuals and emphasises uniqueness, favouring qualitative methods in research.
• Such an approach was common in early psychology (for example Freud’s case studies) but fell out of favour with the rise of behaviourism at the start of the 19th century.
• Psychologists today have established much more rigorous qualitative techniques which are scientific i.e they can be objective and systematic.
• Triangulation is a further method of systematic analysis that is used. This is the process of looking at a number of different research findings (qualitative and quantitative) to see to what extent they all point in a similar direction.
• e.g. the effects of shift work on sleep disruption might be explored by interviewing a night worker (self report), making detailed observations using equipment in a sleep laboratory (observation) and also using experiments to determine the effects of sleep deprivation. If these all generate similar results with regards to sleep disturbance, the validity of the conclusions high.

Question 5

What are the costs of psychology being a science?

determinism

Answer 5

Determinism:

• The scientific approach is determinist as its aim is to demonstrate cause and effect relationships. Such understandings enable us to control our world but may also misrepresent it because the idea of simple determinism may be mistaken, even in physics. Chaos theory proposes that very small changes in initial conditions can result in major changes- called the butterfly effect.
• this means that systems don’t obey simple cause and effect principles, especially in psychology. Trying to produce cause and effect answers in psychology is therefore misleading and doesn’t represent what actually happens.

Question 6

What are the costs of psychology being a science?

reductionist

Answer 6

• The scientific approach is reductionist because it seeks to identify single variables that can be manipulated, which means breaking complex behaviours into individuals elements.
• This approach may limit psychological insights. For example the psychiatrist R.D. Laing (1965) argued that reductionist explanations of schizophrenia (e.g. physical - chemical system gone wrong) missed important elements of the disorder, such as the distress experienced by a patient.
• Such psychologists prefer a more holist approach. This approach focuses on systems as a whole rather than on the constituent parts, and suggests that we cannot predict how the whole system will behave just from the knowledge of the individual components.
• This means that reductionist explanations would only play a limited role in understanding behaviour.

Question 7

Focus on the general rather than the individual

Answer 7

• in addition, Laing claimed that the aim of the scientific approach is to make generalisations about behaviour (the nomothetic approach) whereas he felt that treatment could only succeed if each patient was treated as an individual case. This suggests that the scientific approach may not be suitable for at least some of the concerns of psychologists