Psychology as a Science

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Historically, psychology has modelled itself on physics in its quest to become a science of behavior or a science of mental life. Has psychology succeeded in this quest to become a science like physics? Or has this quest led psychology astray?

-- Suzy Hodge (suzanneh@student.unsw.edu.au), March 31, 2001

Answers

Experimental psychologists attempted to model psychology to become a science just like natural science in a field called psychophysics. They followed experimental designs with strict controls. These practices in some way modeled psychology into a natural science.

But to me, psychology bears some difference to those natural sciences like physics because not every behavior can be manipulated or controlled like natural sciences. Such manipulation and controls are more suitable for disciplines such as perception and cognition, but are not quite relevant to those disciplines such as personality, social psychology, and human behavior in natural settings.

Well, to me, I greatly appreciate the efforts made by experimental psychologists in making attempts at quantifying, controlling, and manipulating behavior under study. I believe that this is a great milestone away from the "introspection" orientation to turn psychology into a more objective discipline.

-- Shirley Lao (laosx@yahoo.com), March 31, 2001.


If you look closely at the work of early experimental psychologists, I think you will find that the branch of natural science they were most influenced by was not physics, but rather, PHYSIOLOGY -- thus the common 19th-century expression "physiological psychology," (N.B., the title of Wundt's early textbook!) which did NOT mean "studying the physiological bases of psychology," as it does today, but rather meant, "studying psychology via the *methods* used in physiology" (i.e., experimental methods).

One very good article that surveys the profound differences in the uses of the term "experiment" in psychology and in other sciences (including physics) is:

Winston, A.S. & Blais, D.J. (1996). What counts as an experiment? A transdisciplinary analysis of textbooks, 1930-1970. American Journal of Psychology, 109, 599-616.

Another important article that discusses (national) differences in early approaches to experimental psychology is:

Danziger, K. (1985). The origins of the psychological experiment as a social institution. American Psychologist, 40, 133-140.

One of the best books on the topic of the relation between early experimental psycohlogy and physiology is:

O'Donnell, J.M. (1985). The origins of behaviorism: American psychology, 1870-1920. New York: New York University Press.

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@chass.utoronto.ca), March 31, 2001.


Hi Suzy, physiology like Chris says is probably closer to the natural science they had in mind. You'll want to look up Fechner and see how he wanted to tie the mind body issue together. Now with regard to your second part, it depends how you view science. If you look at science as a descriptive functional relationship between variables, like Ohm's Law: E=IXR, then psychology hasn't done too bad for itself. You've got Fechner's Law, and Skinner's schedules of reinforcement, and the learning(forgetting) curves. You get the idea. Fechner did what he set out to do; he found a functional relationship between stimulis intensity and mental life, and he expressed it in math, and you know what they say, no math no science. Best, David

-- david clark (doclark@yorku.ca), April 02, 2001.

Some branches of psychology appear to have succeeded, but I believe the search led psychology astray. What is psychology if not the study of the psyche? We seem to have left that to the psychoanalysts and to the object relations developmentalists. In my quest to understand my psychotherapy clients, I use little of what scientific psychology has offered, and often turn to the 'philosophical psychologies' on which the scientists look down with disdain. Watson talked about the desire to predict and control. I'm more interested in understanding, and helping the individual to learn to make informed choices. A model that seeks to control leaves out the whole realm of experience previously assigned to the will. In interpersonal psychology, control and submission is only one end of the conative experience--the other end is giving and taking autonomy. The scientific quest seems to leave that experience out.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@fuller.edu), May 23, 2001.

Is psychology really modelled upon the natural sciences? While this seems to be a commonplace I think there is not really a good argument to be made for this point. Sure, psychology tends to work with numbers (a little) and tries, in one sense or the other, to formalize (a little), but as far as I'm concerned that's where the similarity stops. Typical psychological research either uses some variant of the factorial design (i.e., anova-type) which I have never seen in physics, or some kind of correlational analysis (i.e., factor or structural equation models) which I have also never seen in physics. Theoretical analysis, experimental design, data analysis, and interpretation of results are different from those of the natural sciences, or at least physics, in almost every conceivable way. (This has not so much to do with control: the bulk of phenomena studied in the natural sciences (e.g., the universe in astronomy, the weather in meteorology, and so on) are not amendable to experimental control. Point is that the universe is a very simple research object compared to the human mind.) Now, a case may be made for a superficial resemblance to physiology, perhaps a somewhat stronger one for research areas close to that field such as perception or psychophysics, but for most areas I fail to see strong links (and certainly not links permitting the conclusion that psychology is 'modeled upon' such sciences). In my opinion, psychology has a research tradition and methodology very much its own. Whether that tradition has been successful is of course a different question. Many people question psychological research for its objective approach to people. I would say that anybody who desires to do so may take another approach (i.e., introspection, verstehen, or whatever) and could show how that approach is useful. Point is that subjective approaches have (so far) not provided very substantial research. What there is in psychological progress has (so far) come from objective approaches. Which may, of course, change in the future. Because of the objective approach, there is a widespread feeling that psychology fails to capture the 'right' information about people, especially at the level of understanding individuals (see previous posting). But I think that to expect such knowledge from science (which is concerned with general relations and laws), concerning probably the most difficult subject matter in the universe (the conscious mind), for understanding individuals (if we have learned one thing about people, it is that there are too many individual differences to apply general relations to individuals), in a mere 100 years, would be a little naive. It took us 2000 years to understand the behaviour of billiard balls - so we better start thinking in terms of millenia. Yes, I think psychology in a wide sense (i.e., the scientific approach to the human mind) is succesful: As successful as might be expected after a 100 years. To give an example, I know that S-R learning as a very hard time to account for complex types of human behaviour - people in the thirties obviously did not. I know that simple theories of the way people respond to items in questionnaires (e.g., Item Response Theory) fail in the majority of cases and apply only to a narrow subset of measurements, which people in the fifties did not know. I know that men and women do not differ substantially in the degree to which they can solve iq-type problems, which people in the beginning of the previous century did not know. That is substantial, although modest, knowledge. It won't cure your client, but it is progress.

-- Denny Borsboom (ml_borsboom.d@macmail.psy.uva.nl), July 24, 2001.


Although the posted question is of importance, I think it is crucial to also consider the future implications of any given answer. Whether or not psychology has suceeded in its strivings to attain the status of science in the past has serious ramifications for where it should go in the future, a situation that invites a re-evaluation in light of modern philosophy, science etc as 'traditional' relationships would seem to have changed. It is perhaps due to Quine’s naturalism in epistemology, and the relevance of the philosophy of science (Popper etc), having finally usurped the analytic tradition (logical positivism,linguistic philosophy), that psychology oriented in the continental tradition (most definitely not in the image of acience)has now arisen as a possibility for modern psychology. The analytic path is one of naturalisation based on assumption that epistemology cannot be detached completely from the individual whereas continental philosophy holds true to a firm belief that what is important is the fact that humans are social beings. However as Terwee (1989) suggests, the distinctive contrasts that remain should be seen as complementary and not necessary in competition. Indeed, to use a somewhat dated example, McDougall (1929) and Scultz et al, the behaviourist’s harshest critics, argued for such a conception across contrasts, agreeing that the data of behaviour was the proper focus of psychological research but arguing that, equally, the data of consciousness and experience was indispensable. The decline of traditional Philosophy (witnessed through the decline of positivism, the rise of naturalism and an increasingly ‘human’ view of science) suggest that wherever psychology goes next it will embrace far more than that seen under the guise of science.

-- Jodie Barden (jodie.barden@virgin.net), August 07, 2001.

Actually there's a little quote by Claude Bernard that I have always liked: "Reasoning is always the same, whether in the sciences that study living beings or in those concerned with inorganic bodies. But each kind of science presents different phenomena and complexities and difficulties of investigation peculiarly its own...This makes the principles of experimentation incomparably harder to apply to medicine and the phenomena of living bodies than to physics and the phenomena of inorganic bodies".

Bernard, 1865, Introduction to study of experimental medicine.

In other words, logic is the same wherever you look but some phenomena are difficult to analyze. Variability is an intrinsic property of behavior (and physiology), as it may confer evolutionary advantage. The problem is that we have a much more limited capability to measure mind compared to the objects of interest in physics. For example, in the study of basic sensation one needs to know what the stimulus is, obviously. This seems trivial - of course we know that light is the stimulus for visual sensation - but in fact we still do not know (exactly) what the internal stimuli are for other basic sensations, such as hunger.

Finally I would turn your question on top of itself and ask whether physics itself has succeeded as a science since it is well known that the principles of quantum physics are not compatible with einstein's relativity [very recent hypotheses aside]. There is a disparity of analysis scale, between the atomic principles and the planetary ones. By analogy one might suggest a similar challenge in comparing studies that objectively measure behavior and those that measure mental processes. In my opinion, we are limited mostly by the the tools with which we are able to measure our phenomena of interest.

[PS: Hi chris, I enjoyed visiting your website!]

-- J BAIRD (baird.84@osu.edu), January 02, 2002.


I think that, fortunately, psychology (and social sciences in general) will always be inexact(as John Stuart Mill said) like meteorology and tidology. Imagine what would happen if a ...social Newton gave us a law that would make human behaviour as predictable as an eclipse...Who would control such scientific laws and how? I don't even want to think about it...

-- elen vlahou (elenin@otenet.gr), September 10, 2002.

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