Controversy: Scientific Status Flashcards
How is taking a scientific approach to psychology useful?
Useful as allows greater production of quantifiable data which is easier to analyse and draw conclusions.
How is taking a nomothetic approach through being scientific advantageous.
Furthermore, a scientific approach can be seen as nomothetic- where laws are based on the studies of a few individuals.
Therefore, this allows aspects of psychology such as the biological approach to theorise wide-spread theories such as the fight or flight response.
How could you argue taking a nomothetic approach is not advantageous?
In contrast, RD Laing 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 due to the nomothetic approach.
Therefore, a focus on the scientific approach could lose focus on individual differences its ideographic content.
How could it be argued that psychology can be ideographic and not scientific yet still have value?
On the contrary to nomothetic theories, ideographic emphasises individual difference.
This is typical with Freudian psychology to develop theories of the unconscious.
Freudian theories are qualitative and made through subjective introspection and thus are unscientific.
However, Hopfield, through a computer stimulation of the brain, found evidence to support Freud’s theory of condensation. Therefore, psychological theories do not need to be scientific to be supported and have some value.
How is psychology transitioning to being more scientific?
Moreover, qualitative methods in psychology are now becoming more scientific using theoretic analysis in case studies.
Identifying behaviours and counting such behaviours to draw conclusions.
In addition, a new method of triangulation analyses qualitative and quantitative data to see the extent to which they point in a similar direction.
Therefore, it is evident that psychology gearing itself in a more scientific direction which has benefited the field in terms of qualitative techniques in research.
How is becoming too scientific a risk for the field of psychology?
However, if psychology becomes too scientific, then it could suffer from determinism.
Where cause and effect relationships are established, however, these may misrepresent psychological findings.
For example, chaos theory suggests that small initial change leads to major subsequent changes that cause-and-effect relationships.
Therefore, determinism may hinder psychological research.
What is a second risk of psychology becoming too scientific?
In addition, due to the becoming more scientific, psychology may become too reductionist and oversimplified, where complex behaviours are broken down into separate components.
For example, RD Laing Says that the biological explanation for schizophrenia is a chemical system gone wrong.
However, Laing Says that the explanation misses out the distress of the patient. Thus, the scientific approach may restrict psychology to identifying and manipulating single variables. A more holistic overview may be required.
What is the conclusion?
In conclusion, psychology may benefit from being a scientific, but it becomes too rooted in science it may lose depth and understanding of its behaviors.
Perhaps it is more important for the subject matter of psychology to shift from mental illness to celebrating positive emotions and human flourishing as expressed by Aristotle.
This is supported by Sheldon and King who stated that psychology being negatively biased has led to only a partial understanding of human cognition and emotion.
I believe it is more crucial for psychology to have a range of research methods, whether they be more or less scientific. This can be done by taking a range of experiments, from the biological approach to introspection in the cognitive approach.
This breadth in psychology makes it widely applicable to a variety of situations in the non-academic world and covers all basis.
