The Psychology of the “Psychology Isn’t a Science” Argument
August 23, 2013 8959
Every so often the internet is set ablaze with opinion pieces on a familiar question: Are “soft” sciences, like psychology, actually science? Most of the time the argument against psychology as a science comes from people from the so-called harder sciences (you know, people who don’t know ish about psychology). Of course, every once in a while we throw ourselves under the bus by declaring that for our softer sciences to be taken seriously, we must be more like the real sciences. You’re still reading this so most likely you are interested in my opinion on this topic. With a quick nod to others who have covered this topic here, here, here, and here, let’s review some of the arguments for and against psychology as a science in what follows.
Whenever I read a story about how psychology isn’t a real science it is usually accompanied by mentions of some psychologists (and I use the term loosely here) engaging in unscientific things. This includes the stacks and stacks of pseudo scientific self-help books that claim to reveal the science of X, the mere existence of celebrity psychologists like Dr. Drew or Dr. Phil, and the fraudulent research of now disgraced psychologists like Dirk Smeesters or Marc Hauser.
It is true that psychology has its fair share of pseudo science, I mean the entire diagnostic manual of mental disorders has continued to resist integration with research findings (see here). However, there is real science happening here in psychology–that is, our scientific journals are packed with research summaries where psychological scientists have used the scientific method to test a specific hypothesis.
The argument that a field is not a science just because some of its members aren’t scientists doesn’t really hold water. Take the case of fraud as an example: Have you been to retraction watch recently? If you go there you will find that scientific fraud is not the domain of just the soft sciences. Fraud effects the sciences, from hard to soft.
II. Psychology doesn’t define its terminology well enough to be considered a science
Some people (usually who know little about psychology) argue that psychologists don’t define their terms clearly enough to be considered a science. In one example of this, a physicist named Alex Berezow (using a bunch of sciency terms that my poor psychologist brain struggled to understand) argued that happiness research is a perfect example of a failure to define terms. He states that “the meaning of the word differs from person to person and especially between cultures.”
Setting aside the point of cultural variability for a second, I actually think that happiness research is a very bad example of poor definitions in psychology. People who study subjective well-being have spent decades arriving at a definition of the construct that is comprised of three parts–subjective cognitive assessments of one’s life as meaningful, positive affect, and negative affect. Importantly, they didn’t just come to a definition by writing a random opinion piece in the LA times about a field they know nothing about. Instead, researchers arrived at this definition based on decades of evidence gathered based on thousands (possibly millions by now) of people reflecting on their happiness (go here for the source of this effort). This hardly seems like a deficit in terminology.
III. Psychology relies too heavily on subjective experience
Much of what bothers people about psychology is the sheer subjectivity of it all. That is, how we perceive any number of social phenomena is likely to vary a great deal from person to person. This problem is at the very core of psychology research, and many people feel that, to be science, psychologists must uncover universal human psychological processes.
The problem with this logic is that the search for human universals, with very few exceptions, is likely to be a fool’s errand. Studying the human experience means asking people how they feel, and those feelings are likely to vary from person to person, situation to situation, and culture to culture. The inherent messiness is the challenge that each psychologist faces in his/her research (and the fun). That psychological phenomena are often culturally or situationally bound is not evidence of lack of scientific rigor, but rather, acknowledgement of the power of cultures and situations to influence how we perceive and respond to our social environments.
Of course, some psychologists think the subjective isn’t sciency enough, and so they operationalize their variables in ways that are far less bound to the meaning messiness of questionnaire measures. In the realm of happiness, if a researcher is unsatisfied with subjective ratings, he or she might measure the length of telomeres (a marker of cell aging) or the levels of glucocorticoid hormones in the blood stream. Psychologists do this too, and this sort of work is much closer to what even a physicist or chemist might consider science.Of course, whether a psychologists uses subjective self-reports or biological measures (or mathematical models that “precisely” quantify the golden ratio of positive affect) does not make them any more of a scientist. All biological measures really do is make psychologists look more like “hard” scientists to other “hard” scientists.
IV. Psychology isn’t falsifiable
This criticism comes from within our own field as well as from the outside:Psychologists too often publish positive findings–that is findings that support rather than contradict hypotheses. Publication of primarily positive findings suggests that psychologists are more interested in supporting their own beliefs about human experience than in finding truth about that experience. It is because of this trend that one of my colleagues suggested that our field contains more lawyers than scientists (here).
This criticism is actually a fair one in my book–psychologists are often likely to bury data that does not support their theories about the world (even famous psychologists like Stanley Milgram are guilty of this). This practice strikes me as unscientific because it renders hypotheses more difficult to falsify. However, the good news is that efforts are underway to pay more attention to negative findings (see here).
What is the psychology behind the “Psychology isn’t a Science” argument?
I think there are several basic psychological principles that help explain why this argument strikes a nerve with so many people. I tend to think of it in terms of social comparison. Psychologists like to weigh in on the psychology is a science perspective because we are engaging in upward social comparison–We want a seat at the table with the hard sciences, we want to be published in the most prestigious science journals, and we want a larger share of the grant funding from our government. In contrast, the harder sciences engage in downward social comparison with psychology–Hard sciences seek to maintain their elevated position in the science hierarchy, and sometimes they accomplish this by disparaging the softer sciences.To close, I would just like to point out that psychology is a very young science, and so to expect it to have the same prestige and admiration as other sciences that have been around for centuries is a little far-fetched. Just like it takes a person time to build respect and prestige amongst his or her co-workers, psychology is going to have to be around for a bit longer before it starts earning the respect and admiration of other sciences. I’m okay with this and if you want to talk with me more about this issue I’ll be here: Doing science.
I think there are several basic psychological principles that help explain why this argument strikes a nerve with so many people. I tend to think of it in terms of social comparison. Psychologists like to weigh in on the psychology is a science perspective because we are engaging in upward social comparison–We want a seat at the table with the hard sciences, we want to be published in the most prestigious science journals, and we want a larger share of the grant funding from our government. In contrast, the harder sciences engage in downward social comparison with psychology–Hard sciences seek to maintain their elevated position in the science hierarchy, and sometimes they accomplish this by disparaging the softer sciences.To close, I would just like to point out that psychology is a very young science, and so to expect it to have the same prestige and admiration as other sciences that have been around for centuries is a little far-fetched. Just like it takes a person time to build respect and prestige amongst his or her co-workers, psychology is going to have to be around for a bit longer before it starts earning the respect and admiration of other sciences. I’m okay with this and if you want to talk with me more about this issue I’ll be here: Doing science.
Fanelli, D. (2010). Positive Results increase down the hierarchy of the sciences PLOS ONE DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010068
Fredrickson BL, & Losada MF (2005). Positive affect and the complex dynamics of human flourishing. The American psychologist, 60 (7), 678-86 PMID: 16221001
Taylor SE, & Lobel M (1989). Social comparison activity under threat: downward evaluation and upward contacts. Psychological review, 96 (4), 569-75 PMID: 2678204
By Michael Kraus
Read the original article, and more like it, at the Psychology Blog, Psych Your Mind
The answer that psychology longs for is a universal underlier. I have it; people do not truly love themselves and subsequently search for validation among external sources, compounding the problem.
Read Karl Popper, you cannot combine statistics and science since science is falsified if there is evidence contrary to a theory, whereas with statistics you can ignore the outlier. This is the reason almost all academics do not consider psychology a science in the proper sense, it isn’t a pseudoscience either though unless you are adamant that it is science – it is a SOCIAL science.
Using your logic biology and chemistry are not sciences either. Karl Popper may be venerated by many naive scientists, but his views have long been discredited for not solving the problems of inference that he tried so hard to solve.
I think that you can certainly get a lot of useful information from studying psychology, however, there is a major problem with it. 30 years ago it would have been thought that let’s say you have a trauma, that you need to work out your feelings, nowadays they say not to ruminate at all – so what happens 20 years from now, do we say that ruminating is actually natural, and necessary? The answers are constantly changing. With hard sciences, when we discover gravity, we don’t go back on that in 20 years. When we discover atoms, we don’t go… Read more »
Sorry to disagree but other scientific ‘facts’ have been proven wrong time and time again (just look at poor old Pluto). Psychology does what all other sciences do, draws conclusions given the information available at the time. Based on your description of a science, only mathematics could truly claim that title
I like to think of psychology as philosophy once was in ancient Greece, a kind of proto-science. Philosophers were pretty much the pre-cursor to science as we know it today. It wasn’t until Aristotle that the scientific method was even invented. I imagine if we dismissed men like Plato and their ideas entirely we probably wouldn’t have progressed to science as we know it today.
Psychology isn’t perfect, but at present it’s all we have alongside neuroscience, which can only provide so many answers by itself.
Good pooints here’s an intresting article about psychology as an unscientific discipline:
http://psychology.okstate.edu/faculty/jgrice/psyc3214/Trendler2009.pdf
“Hard scientists” dismiss psychology because its methodology is dangerous to real science and decreases the credibly of science as a field.
Marc
I am facisnated by my surroundings and I always asking question which field should study for my future career and I have this burning interest about studying psychology apart from Political Science. Could you tell me psychology is the way forward for interpreting future events seems the world is moving into most advance and complex society?
For a subject field to be a Science, its theories Must Be Falsifiable.
There are no “ifs” or “buts”. Theories must be falsifiable.
Theories of Psychology are not falsifiable, there for, Psychology is not a Science.
Psychology is a Pseudo-Science.
Neuroscience is a Science.
Psychological theories are falsifiable. No “ifs” or “buts.” Thete has not been much effort in the Psychological community to do so, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible.
Psychologists typically do not provide conceptually coherent and theoretically grounded definitions for their key “constructs”. I will not debate “happiness” (a mark on a Likert scale representing what?). Let’s take the subject of over 7,000 published academic papers since 1970 — the self? I defy anyone to provide a consensually sanctioned, theoretically justifiable definition of this presumed causally potent psychological entity. You cannot. Indeed, psychologists cannot determine– within the clan- if the self refers to an experienced reality, a mechanistic outcome or sheer illusion. Wittgenstein saw this conceptual vacuity clearly more than 70 years ago. Alas, since then little has… Read more »
“…the harder sciences engage in downward social comparison with psychology–Hard sciences seek to maintain their elevated position in the science hierarchy, and sometimes they accomplish this by disparaging the softer sciences.” The above unsupported opinion is not exactly productive toward lending more credibility to psychology. Most ‘hard’ scientists would read this sentence and then rightly discount this article as an example of the fuzzy thinking with which they do not care to ‘share a table’. The reality is that we do not yet possess the requisite understanding of the human mind and resultant personality nor the measurement instruments that will… Read more »
In my studies of sociology and psychology and some hard sciences (physics, chemistry, etc.), I’ve found an interesting distinction that I think, though the ship has sailed, would have made I think an enormous distinction as to how psychology is perceived by the public. This relates to how we perceive two groups of historically influential peoples in the history of psychology. The first group I will call the “Proto-psychiatrists”. The beginning student is briefly exposed to thousands of years of non-scientific explanations of behavioral abnormality, including humors, demonic possession, and the like, and then usually with Freud are told “here… Read more »
Thank you so much for this Mark! Very well written.