Controversy - Scientific Status Flashcards
What’s criteria is needed to be called a science?
What’s the dominant mode of investigation in psychology?
Objective, produced nomothetic knowledge that can be falsified and replicated.
Laboratory experiments offer high levels of control, predictability and falsifiability
Why was Loftus and palmers research scientific?
Why might scientific methods lower internal/external validity?
Falsifiable/replicable as procedures were well written and reported.
Objective as quantitative data was used - mph.
Controlled, artificial conditions to identify nomothetic cause and effect.
Internal - Demand characteristics and researcher bias.
External - artificial so can’t generalise. Doesn’t meet criteria for making nomothetic knowledge.
What methods are used in traditional psychodynamic psychology?
What psychodynamic psychologists feel the need to embrace scientific methods?
What does this suggest?
Qualitative methods like case studies - bowlby 44 thieves.
Allow researchers to analyse the causes of behaviour for single individuals without seeking general explanations.
Neo Freudian solms 2000 - used pet scans to support Freud theory of dreaming. Solms showed using pet scans that during dreams areas to do with rational thought like frontal cortex were inactive but memory and desire were active.
Suggest an oversimplification that psychodynamic psychology is always unscientific as some modern psychology clearly used scientific methods.
What term was used by Thomas Kuhn?
What did he argue there needed to be to be called a science?
Does psychology have one?
What type of science is psychology?
Thomas Kuhn - used paradigm to shared set of assumotions, methods and terminology.
To be called a science needs a clear paradigm.
Psychology consists of different explanations can’t claim to have a paradigm.
Argued psychology was a pre science - not yet reached the maturity of natural sciences although it may in the future.
Why do hard sciences lack an overall paradigm?
What does this suggest?
Disagreement over fundamental assumptions and methods of study.
Stephen rose - biology has a number of paradigms. 5 biologists and a frog - explain frog jumping in different ways.
Suggests a single paradigm may not be needed to consider psychology a science as biology is a science and it doesn’t have a clear paradigm.
Science continues to change throughout time - what does this mean?
Why is falsification not always possible?
What did woit argue?
Suggests?
Can no longer be categorised along traditional views of hard and soft science.
Physics - ‘very scientific’, modern physicists examine events which cannot be falsified like events before the Big Bang.
Woit - modern physics is devoting more time to unfalsifiable theories. Makes the disciple of physics less scientific.
Suggests that psychology may not be considered unscientific because some areas are falsifiable.
What does positive psychology aim to do?
In early psychology what were the most appropriate methods for understanding?
What was favoured until recently?
What’s been developed recently?
Aims to move psychology away from a fixation on pathology in a scientific way.
Idiographic methods which collected qualitative data to understand individual motivations and desires.
Rise of behaviourism meant objectivity measuring behaviour was seen as the best way to continue. Quantitative data to make nomothetic statements was favoured until recently.
Developed methods of making qualitative date more objective and measurable like thematic analysis to make analysis more objective.
What’s thematic analysis?
What’s triangulation?
A way of transforming qualitative data into quantitative. Decide on themes that there then quantified to determine most and least common.
Multiple studies to confirm, questionnaire with closed questions to confirm the results of an observation.
What did the APS give evidence for?
Is psychology culturally determined?
Growing use of brain scanning methods and neuroscience in psychology. Favour objective, quantitative measurement of the brain suggest that as the use of technology increased we may be facing a return to a more nomothetic, objective understanding of behaviour.
Psychology - culturally determined, Graham - east - psychology emphasises the spiritual, the inner self and the subjective. The west - objective, scientific measurement of observable behaviour. Need to be aware of any change in the nature of psychology may not be universal.
What benefits are there to society as a whole with psychology being a science?
Ethically - wrong to give people a drug for depression without having some confidence if it works effectively and so scientific studies allow us to be more confident and identify any side effects reducing the risk of harm.
Economically - scientific research can be applied in ways that save government and local services money.
Antidepressants thought to save around £22.5 billion w year in England due to less relaid e on talking therapies - mccrone et al
What benefits are there to psychology as a subject?
Funding implications - stem subjects attract more higher funding from government and private businesses. The public campaign for the arts - claimed the government was cutting funding for arts subjects in HE by 50%.
Student motivation - often respected by parents ( Australia’s youth in stem 2019-2020 report). Thought maths was important rp to secure a good job in 90% of parents. More likely to encourage students which will enable careers in science
Stronger voice in public debate. Evidence from science more credible if based on evidence not opinion. Positive applications more creditworthy. Can help improve lives in ways non scientific therapies can’t .
E.g - star charts in animals applied to humans.
What drawbacks are there when psychology uses scientific methods?
Reductionist, scientific methods may not be well suited to understanding individual causes of behaviour - identify single variables that can be manipulated. Can limit our understanding. Laing - scientific explanations of schizophrenia missed important elements like distress.Monel be treated as idiographic rather than nomothetic. Also favoured a more holistic approach.
Miss deeper meanings - quantitative techniques like observations and experiments researchers may miss out on deeper understanding of our behaviour. Lower internal validity.
Quantitative data can be biased and damaging as scientific evidence is seen as more credible. Scientific racism - scientific research to justify prejudicial attitudes towards specific ethnicities.
Morton - whit people had larger skulls on average than black people. Damage to society by cussing divisions between people.
Can unscientific psychology bring benefits?
Even unscientific methods can bring benefits. Psychoanalysis - Eysenck examined 10,000 patients and found 44% ‘cured/much improved or improved’.
