Is Psychology a science, or a common scene?

-- Jo Bass (littlemiss_fielden@hotmail.com), September 12, 2004

Answers

Perhaps a bit of both? Certainly professional psychology aims to be scientific, and much of what we discover through scientific research doesn't match with what we thought was common sense. On the other hand, much scientific research supports what we've known through common sense. So what we call "common sense" must be tested to see if it's a reflection of reality, or the facts. There was actually a school of psychology called "The Common Sense School" that objected to a previous school of thought that didn't appear to follow common sense--you can read about that in History of Psychology textbooks. Also, in medieval psychology there was a "common sense" that had the job of putting together the information gathered by the special senses (hearing, vision, touch, taste, smell).

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@cox.net), September 12, 2004.

Generally, this depends on what psychology means to you. But in precise, it is a science.

To some extent, we are all everyday psychologists, trying to reason and understand how and why others think and behave in a way. In this case, psychology is a common sense, and there is a term called folk psychology that can be used to describe it. But psychology as a field of study is largely scientific (it is an art in some case like counselling). It is a science because it employs scientific thinking and methods to reach its objectives.

However, and this is the important part, as recent cognitive researches have shown that human reasoning is often flawed, there are significant differences among folk psychology and scientific psychology (although some findings do support common sense theories). Therefore, I think psychology is best described as a science, because most of the time, we - as folk psychologists - do psychology wrong.

-- Bagus Tirta Susilo (bagustirtasusilo@hotmail.com), September 13, 2004.

Hi Jo, it's going to be tough to sort that out. Often scientific advances look like common sense in retrospective. So you would have to take in account folk wisdom. Some would say science is what public consent says it is. Best, David

-- david clark (doclark@yorku.ca), September 20, 2004.