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Author | Topic: Is experimental psychology science? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ben! Member (Idle past 1398 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
Many times on this board, people claim that human behavior is the domain of science. Yet this is done without qualification. Human behavior is certainly much less predictable than the motion of a ball or a well-controlled chemical reaction.
The question is, is experimental psychology science? If it is, how do the available methodoliges compare to those in other "hard" sciences? What are the benefits? What are the pitfalls? And what does it all mean in developing a science of how humans work? This topic was approached in another thread. To summarize on MY terms,
robinrohan writes: We just want to be clear that there is a difference between real science (hard science) and this stuff that parades as science, like psychology and sociology. http://EvC Forum: Ambiguity-uncertainty-vagueness the key to resistance against the idea of evolution? -->EvC Forum: Ambiguity-uncertainty-vagueness the key to resistance against the idea of evolution?
Robinrohan calls psychology "pseudo-science."
nwr writes: I agree that there is a substantial difference between soft science and hard science. However, I disagree with what I take as Robin's conclusion. There really is some genuine science done by psychologists and by sociologists. ... To be fair to the social scientists, their subject matter behaves far less predictably than do atoms and molecules. They really do have a harder time of it. http://EvC Forum: Ambiguity-uncertainty-vagueness the key to resistance against the idea of evolution? -->EvC Forum: Ambiguity-uncertainty-vagueness the key to resistance against the idea of evolution? Nwr believes psychology is "soft science", where some genuine science is done, but somehow different than "hard science." This has something to do with the predictability of human behavior, he suggests.
schrafinator writes: quote: So, maybe you'd like to critique this study and explain how it is pseudo-science. http://EvC Forum: Ambiguity-uncertainty-vagueness the key to resistance against the idea of evolution? -->EvC Forum: Ambiguity-uncertainty-vagueness the key to resistance against the idea of evolution? Schraf takes umbrage with robinrohan's claim, and proposes a specific article to discuss. Schraf makes no explict claim as to the "type" of science that experimental psychology is, only challenging robinrohan to show that it's pseudoscience. As for myself... it's a lot of material to cover at once. I'd ask the admins to promote this to "Is it Science" and allow me to address the points individually. Ben
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AdminJar Inactive Member |
Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.
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Funkaloyd Inactive Member |
If ever there were an unpredictable system, it's the weather. Yet, I've never heard meteorology described as a soft or pseudo-science.
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nwr Member Posts: 6408 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Nwr believes psychology is "soft science", where some genuine science is done, but somehow different than "hard science." This has something to do with the predictability of human behavior, he suggests.
Maybe I should clarify that. The term "soft science" is pretty old. The traditional sciences have often been called "hard science", and I assume that "soft science" is a back formation from that. The better term is "social science", but I was just continuing with terminology that had already been used in the other thread. My comment about predictability was a bit too simple. The real problem in the social sciences, is that the type of experimentation that is possible is very limited due to ethical considerations. There are occasional natural experiments, such as when a feral child is discovered. But such natural experiments are rare. For myself, I don't have any doubt that experimental psychology is science.
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nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: I'm not sure I agree. Certain human behaviors are surprisingly predictable, such as autonomic responses.
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nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
The following is another reply from RR to me in the previous thread that I'd like to address:
I don't know what "isolatable" means. It's not a standard scientific term quote: So, is a reaction time (the time it takes for a subject to react to a sensory stimulous) "physical"? I would say it is "behavioral" rather than "physical", so if I am understanding you correctly, you would not consider a reaction time to be valid scientific data. If so, can you explain why?
quote: I agree. But you have yet to specify exactly why it is that you consider the entire field of Psychology a pseudoscience. Show some examples, please.
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1398 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
I'm not sure I agree. Certain human behaviors are surprisingly predictable, such as autonomic responses. Certain human behaviors are more surprising than we'd expect... but:
Galvanic skin response; to what degree of accuracy can you measure it for a single person across multiple trials taken over a series of days? Even if you control for well-known factors, such as time of day? Surely the presence or absence is pretty reliable, but I'd equate that to predicting whether a ball is going to drop or not in physics. It's not a very fine-grained statistic. And take something only slightly more complex; a reaction time test. With what accuracy can we predict somebody's reaction time (say a button press to an unpredictable stimulus) across trials across different days? We'd be lucky to be able to predict within 1% error (we'd be lucky to get within 5 or 10% of error, I think), no matter how many factors you try and control. Take another simple one, one related to your husband's work: working memory span. Take digit span. How consistent are people across trials of digit span tasks? 10% variation? 20% variation? What about playing chess for amateurs? Or decision-making? Go more complex; social intereaction, etc. How about hitting a baseball off of a tee? Or putting a golf ball across a flat green? I agree there are predictable behaviors, as in "will it happen or not" some of the time; to actually question whether as a sum total, "human behavior" is as predictable as the motion of a ball seems preposterous to me. Ben
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1398 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
It's interesting; can you tell us more about meteorology maybe?
I'm curious to know why this distinction seems to be made. Is it actually due to some difference in the systems (total number of factors that control behavior, object-based systems vs. neural-networks, ability to break meterology down to any level of analysis and test it in a lab wheras there are certain types of experiments we cannot run on humans), or simply our perception of the situation (one is physical and caused, the other seems mental and "free"). Ben
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1398 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
Hi nwr,
I did my best to summarize when pulling things over here; thanks for clarifying. I agree that one of the big factors driving difficulties in cognition is the type of experimentation we use is so limited due to ethical considerations. We have beautiful maps of connectivity principles of macaque visual cortices, but the same work can only be attempted using much weaker experimental setups for humans. We know much more about the rat hippocampus than we know about the human one. It's a real concern; what can actually be accomplished with techniques that:
And I haven't even gotten into crazy analysis techniques that further decrease the power of the data. Where does it leave us? Is experimental psychology "hard science"? What is our criterion? For example, what behaviors are predictable to even a 5% accuracy (our arbitrary test for significance) for a single trial on a single subject? Is that a fair criterion? Ben
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1398 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
Schraf,
I think the original link you gave is to a website that requires a subscription; I found a reprint copy online that is free: Dissociable neural mechanisms underlying response-based and familiarity-based conflict in working memory Thought that might make things easier to pick up and discuss. Ben
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nwr Member Posts: 6408 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Where does it leave us? Is experimental psychology "hard science"?
The terms "soft science" and "hard science" are probably older than I am. These are coffee room terms. When people want to sound a little more professional, the distinction will be between "social sciences" and "physical sciences". Often mathematics is included in the physical sciences, even though it is neither physical nor a science. There is an informal pecking order in the sciences, roughly
physics > chemistry > geology > biology > social sciences.Feynam had a somewhat low opinion of biology, in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". I'm inclined to think that a lot of the distinction between soft and hard sciences has to do with the extent of the theoretical basis, and the degree to which mathematics is used in that theory. Biology has changed since the time of Feynman's experience with it. By now it has a larger theoretical component, and is more mathematical. But I guess I should mention that there is a pecking order in mathematics too, with differential equations ranked considerably higher than combinatorics and graph theory. The mathematics used in physics and chemistry is thus rated higher than what is used in biology. Statistical hypothesis testing, much used in psychology, is probably ranked lower than graph theory, and that may have to do with the perceived softness of the social sciences. In some ways, economics (sometimes dubbed "the dismal science") is more mathematical than other sciences. That's because it has economics has its own clear measuring systems (money, GNP, etc). From the perspective of measurement, the best of psychology is in psychometrics, where psychology develops its own measuring instruments. Whenever you have a measuring instrument, there is a possibility for mathematical analysis of that instrument. Unfortunately, psychological measuring instruments give considerably less precise answers than even the economists' instruments. And they are mired in controversy (does IQ measure an innate ability, or is it culturally biased). In our campus library (Library of Congress classification system), the psychology literature is adjacent to and intermingled with the philosophy literature. It isn't even close to where the science literature may be found. Thus there are all sorts of cues which tend to hint that psychology is not as much of a science as the physical sciences. As for the work that experimental psychologists actually do, some of it is quite good. But psychology gets a bad reputation from its mistakes, such as some of the work on repressed memory.
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RAZD Member (Idle past 1404 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined: |
I think one of the major distinctions between "hard" and "soft" or "physical" and "social" or however you want to define it is the level of determinism you get.
with math there is very hard determinims with chemistry too physics gets a little less - quantum mechanics deals with probability fields for subatomic particles medicine deals with probabilities in treating illnesses because of variability in the patients to both the disease and the medications. Thus we see things like 90% survival in 20 years with treatment. meteorology deals with probabilities of weather systems based on past systems and models of systems that input known variables and assume others. the "social" sciences deal almost exclusively with probability systems What this means is that experiments cannot be done simply with a small sample and get valid results, but that they have to include large samples and have controls for other "pushing" factors that can bias the data (thus requiring even larger sample bases for the data) It also means that they cannot make "hard" conclusions but "soft" ones. Science in general deals with a range of "hard" to "soft" data fields. Evolutionary Psychology is probably the softest I know of to date that can still be called a science (some will debate this) because it is hard {heh} to do a social experiment with historical data. But it does have {testable\falsifiable} hypothesis, and that, bottom line, is the distinction between science and pseudo-science. Don't know if that helps. by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
So, is a reaction time (the time it takes for a subject to react to a sensory stimulous) "physical"? Yes, it's physical. What's not physical: human motivations, feelings, ideas about morality, etc.
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3927 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
guh. no. psychology is not a science. you wanna know why? take a bio class or a physics class and then take a psych class. *boggles*
i'm in my master's in polisci. note the sci. they call it a science because they use 'data' and pursue it according to specifically set out principles. same with psychology. but can they control their experiments? no. it drives me crazy because i'm taking a quantitative methods class and it makes me want to hurl. when dealing with humanity (or any behaviour) you are want in providing control which is essential for a science. does this make animal behaviour a 'soft science'? sure, why not. there is simply too much room for error, too many variables, and too much room for unconscious bias in the oursuit of social studies to claim scientific standards. psychologists are just a little too in touch with their 'feelings' to accept this. the rest of us are fine with it but most still prefer to use data because it provides some grounding for those who demand it. do philosophers need proof? no, because they know that they dabble in the mind and that what they say kant be proven (haha). they know that social proof is dependant on point of view and language and blah blah blah. if a bird can't mate with a fish, that's proof, that hard, that's science. if women in america are suffering more and more from post-partum depression while women in tribal systems don't until you suggest it to them, that's not science, that's people being whiny. if psychologist want to do science, they'll explore the way the brain works, not how people feel.
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RAZD Member (Idle past 1404 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined: |
mrowrrr
people being whiny It's still differences in the levels of determinism of results. Some are better than others, as is true in all sciences. by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ... to share.
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