Is psychology a science?

[Boojatta]

Poll question: Is psychology a science?

[Cronus Protagonist]

1. Of course it is.

Psychiatry, now, that's another story!

[pokerfan]

6. Fields arranged by purity

[GreenPartyVoter]

12. LOL

[Ratty]

2. It meets all the criteria

Observation, theory, testability, reproducibility. It produces excellent predictive models.

[saras]

9. Sarcasm, surely

As far as I know, it has quite thoroughly failed all these tests for the past 100 years.

We still have no theories as to why our popular mood-altering chemicals do what they do. Drugs that nominally affect the same receptor system in the same way have radically differing effect from each other.

Its a social science, which is to say it's part of the mechanism of social control. It's about as much a science as terrorism is.

[Indenturedebtor]

17. Lol here's a list of most of the disciplines of psychology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_psychology_disciplines

If you'd studied neuropharmacology you wouldn't have made that statement about psychoactive drugs. I hope you enjoy the link!

[Orrex]

3. It's an anagram of SLY COPY HOG

[Igel]

4. Can be.

Sometimes it's vague musings on a vast set of observations. What you get out is basically what you look for.

Sometimes you control the situation so that you're examining a single behavior in a single context that can be varied, and you run the experiment enough to get statistically valid conclusions.

So I've done eye-tracking to monitor real-time processing of reflexive pronouns. You have specially constructed and vetted stimuli, you know the timing of hearing and processing to within a few ms. You get results, and it's science.

"Psychology" is too big a tent to yield a single answer.

[Boojatta]

5. Kick

[Orsino]

7. Anyone who's studied it can see that it is.

It includes some neuroanatomy, statistics, sociology, and who knows what else. Even from my single course, I can see that. Who says it's not a science?

[ZombieHorde]

8. My wife and I have a running joke in our household in which

sociology, and sometimes psychology, are referred to as liberal arts.

We are both college students, so such jokes are hilarious to us.

[Avalux]

10. It depends on how you define "science".

If science = truths observed and tested through scientific methods, then it's a gray area and some would say no. Psychology is subjective in many ways; doesn't always produce physical evidence which can be measured and reproduced.

[Indenturedebtor]

14. Go take a modern psych course in any one of the branches

It's unfortunate that the self help section of airport bookstores is where many people draw their opinion of the science of psychology from.

[Boojatta]

15. What do you think of the following Democratic Underground thread?

George Soros on the concept of social science

[Indenturedebtor]

16. Soros probably doesn't know the first thing about the sciences

George Soros (Hungarian: Soros György) (pronounced /ˈsɔroʊs/ or /ˈsɔrəs/,<3>; Hungarian IPA: <ˈʃoroʃ>; born August 12, 1930, as Schwartz György) is a Hungarian-American currency speculator, stock investor, businessman, philanthropist, and liberal political activist.<4> He became known as "the Man Who Broke the Bank of England" after he made a reported $1 billion during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crisis.<5><6>

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros

Expertise in one field is not generalizable to others. In the quotes you offered he eloquently stated internally consistent opinions, but as another poster pointed out - these are opinions. I would like to see the studies that he bases these opinions on. I would love to see how he applied the scientific method in a reliable way to hold up the broad brush with which he paints all social sciences as unscientific :P

Psychology spans the full spectrum of scientific investigation: ranging at one end from surveys and environmental observation (much like sociology), to the other end of decoding the electrical and chemical impulses of neural networks using physics, organic chemistry, anatomy, etc, and direct manipulation. Psychology has allowed millions of otherwise disabled people to live somewhat to fully self-sufficient and fulfilling lives, and is even now helping paralyzed people to walk, people who were thought to be brain dead talk, people who are blind to see. Anyone who broad-brushes psychology as a soft-science only demonstrates that they don't know what they're talking about.

Psychology is the study of the mind. The CNS happens to be the most complicated machine on the planet, and while our study of it is imperfect, to deny that much measurable progress has been made (through generations of scientific rigor) is just plain silly.

[qazplm]

21. I deal with psychologists and pyschiatrists all of the time

as an attorney and let me tell, while the overall areas may fit the definition of science, the practitioners are all over the map.

You can always find one doc to say person X is really mentally ill and another to say he's just fine and dandy. I also find that never have I seen a scientific discipline so dependent on the personal bias and beliefs of the individuals involved. You can have conservative and liberal psychologists and psychiatrists.

It's a soft science like sociology. Not made up, has scientific underpinnings, but a lot of loosey-goosey things going on.

[Boojatta]

11. Kick

[Boojatta]

13. Kick

[Old Troop]

18. If it can't be expressed in numbers, it's not science.

[Orrex]

19. I dated a woman in college who was really good at gelato.

Incidentally, she was a psych major, and she laughed at efforts to characterize psychology as a science.

Don't know whether she was right or wrong in that regard, but there you have it.

[Boojatta]

20. Kick to encourage more votes.

[Boojatta]

22. Kick

[Boojatta]

23. Kick

[Boojatta]

24. Kick