Is experimental psychology science?

Hi Chiroptera,I'll try to respond to your post here, like you suggested I think this proposal is really limited in it's ability to be scientific. You can collect data, but how do you relate different sets of data? You have to have an underlying abstraction or model that tells you whether one data set can be related to another; what is that model here?I would suggest that the above method uses folk psychological concepts of things like perception, emotion, feeling. In other words, all your data and the relations between them will sit on top of folk psychology.That's not scientific. Folk psychology is notoriously ... wrong, folky, common-sensy, can't be the foundation of any rigorous method of study.So what I'm saying is, you can collect surveys, and that's great, but to actually relate the data from two different surveys, you have to justify why that's valid to do. And your justification is going to be folk-psychological. You have to have a model for designing your experiments and identifying confounds--your model is going to be folk psychology. Just like when you use logic on top of false premises, you don't get a good argument--if you use scientific methodology on unscientific premises (folk psychology), what you get out isn't science....Maybe once we actually either accept or reject most of folk psychology, we'll have science. Until then, we'll be stuck with protoscience or pseudoscience. It's really not unusual for people in the field not to identify their folk-psychological assumptions. That is a type of pseudoscience.Cognitive studies are "too close to our belt." It's so hard to be objective. You need to be objective to do science. Anything else is protoscience or pseudoscience; you'll make unwarranted assumptions, you'll give underspecified theories, and you'll make leaps in logic that you shouldn't.I gotta start fishing for some examples. All this general talk is not gonna get us far.Ben

This is a combined response to several of Ben's posts in this thread. Note, however, that I am not a psychologist. I am commenting from the perspective of my understanding of the nature of science, and my own amatuer studies in cognitive science.In Message 39, Ben writes: It isn't easy to come up with good working definitions. If you look at other sciences, you will see that there are periods where scientists are struggling to find usable definitions and concepts. The early scientific investigation into electricity and magnetism comes to mind as an example of this. I see psychology as going along that path, struggling to come up with clear formulations of what is to be investigated. But that is how it has to start.In Message 40, Ben writes: I suggest you take a look at the book "How the laws of physics lie" by Nancy Cartwright. No need to seriously study it. Just browse through it briefly in your campus library. Cartwright discusses how the laws of physics are about things such as chargeless particles, massless charges - things that don't actually exist. And such laws are nevertheless useful because we can piece them together to solve what we are trying to investigate.You are right, that a lot of psychological research is done in labs that don't correspond to real life. Still, that can yield an understanding that is applicable to real life situations. I'll grant that it will be hard for psychology to piece the various components together. But there is value in what is being done.In Message 40, Ben writes: I am as skeptical of folk psychology as you are. I expect that it will eventually be discarded from psychology. But the history of science shows that you cannot discard a theory until you have a good replacement. Even poor theories can be the basis of scientific discovery. Let's remember that the discover of oxygen was made under the assumptions of the phlogiston theory. In a sense, modern chemistry can trace its origins back to work done under phlogiston and alchemy assumptions. Scientific investigation has to start somewhere.Also in Message 40, Ben writes: Fitt's law is an example of an empirical law - a relation found from empirical observations. Newtons laws claimed to be causal laws.Doubtless, causal laws are to be preferred where available. I'm like you, I don't find Fitt's law very satisfying. But this is where psychology runs into difficulty. It might not be possible to find strong causal laws for psychology.The radical behaviorists (the B.F. Skinner school) claim to be finding causal laws of behavior. Count me as a skeptic. I don't think such laws exist.In his book "Beyond Freedom and Dignity", Skinner argued against the idea that we have free will. Radical behaviorists seem to assume that a person is pretty much like a mechanical automaton, and causal laws of behavior do exist and are waiting to be found. I think Skinner was mistaken about this. I think we do have something like free will, in the sense that we are not at all like mechanical automatons. I don't expect that we will ever have strong causal laws of human behavior.In Message 44, Ben writes: I expect that we will eventually come up with "mechanisms" that underly human behavior, but this still will not give us strong predictive laws. Your mechanisms will be different from my mechanisms, and both of our mechanisms will be under constant pressure to change as we continue to learn. We will come to know these mechanisms only in the form of broad principles, because it will be too complex to catalog all of the details for any individual. Moreover, I expect it will turn out that our mechanisms are such as to make us exquisitely sensitive to very subtle details in our environment, and this alone might rule out any hope of being able to predict individual human behavior. The kind to broad statistical laws that you see in Fitt's law might be about as good as you can do in terms of laws.The kind of understanding of mechanisms that I see possible, while it might not lead to strong predictive laws, could still be very useful. It could help design better teaching methods, perhaps it could help design better therapies for various conditions. So I look forward to some sort of success.In Message 46, Ben writes: I think your concept of science is a little too narrow.

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You can collect data, but how do you relate different sets of data? You have to have an underlying abstraction or model that tells you whether one data set can be related to another; what is that model here?

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Yes, part of being a science is that you have to have a theory/model to test. In fact, you can't even productively collect data without a theory since you need a theory to organize your investigation, to give you an idea of what is the important things that you are looking for.If I am reading your post you are claiming that there are no true theories in psychology, that data is being collected without any organized program, that data is not being used to test various models. Am I accurate here?

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt

Yet, the brain is made up of physical processes that can be measured. Chemical processes within the brain affect our thinking. Are you argueing that the processes that make up the 'mind' are not physical and/or caused?

Actually, I thought the paper that I provided was quite accessible. In the abstract, only "amygdala" seems to be ultra-jargony. The layman may not be able to find the amygdala in the brain, but to understand the abstract one only need know that it's part of the brain. The rest seems pretty accessible to anyone with a passing familiarity with psychology. Well, in the animal studies mentioned in the abstract, "fear" in animal studies is operationally defined as "freezing" responses and the like. The human work is about "judgements of trustworthiness" and "approachability". This is operationalized by, well, having people make judgements of trustworthiness and approachability using a rating scale. Nothing too mysterious, and I suspect these are pretty closely related to what people mean in everyday use of the terms. Sophistry? Isn't this debate about whether experimental psychology scientific? Didn't robinrohan make a claim? Didn't I provide material that made him rethink his claim as too extreme?I'm more than willing to move on from this point, but robinrohan's extreme claim - that anything dealing with "non-physical" concepts like motivation, emotions, and "ideas about morality" can't be scientific - is a widespread belief among people who take the "nay" position of this debate topic. Are you familiar with Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis? I'm pretty sure it DOES address a layman's ideas about "fear" and "judgment of approachability" and "judgement of trustworthiness". And your question seems to imply that operational definitions of emotion can't reflect "true" emotion, only behavior. True, behaviors are measured, but do you really think that people giveing ratings of approachability is unrelated to a person's judgement of approachability? Or that a cowering rat isn't feeling fear?And, the topic of this thread isn't whether the jargon of psychology maps well to layman's notions, anyway. That seems to be an entirely different topic.

It isn't interesting to you? Well...so? My point is that, despite all the hand wringing people were making about the "variability" of human behavior, one can still find useful mathematical characterizations of the behavior. Just because psychology tends to have larger error bars than physics doesn't make it intractable or pseudoscience.Fitt's Law is "real". It's testable. It's useful in engineering applications. So why is everyone all concerned about the "variability" of human behavior, and what it means about the scientific status of experimental psychology? What is "high" precision? Predictions in psychology tend to be less precise. So? That can make things more difficult, but is irrelevant to the topic of this thread. Larger error bars does not make something pseudoscience. Sure it's a "problem". Does that make experimental psychology a pseudoscience? Baddelley's model makes minimal empirical claims. Yes, it's scientific, although it's extremely limited. It's a gloss, but it's not an "utter" gloss. Well, depending on what you mean by "see folk psychology", this statement might be a tautology, or it could be patently false. There are concepts in "folk psychology" that I think are clearly amenable to scientific investigation (e.g., memory). Surely you aren't saying that 1) only computational models are predictive or 2) all computational models are predictive.Many non-computational models make predictions (the ToE?), and many computational models are merely descriptive, not predictive. Many computational models of cognition amount to little more than programming languages of such power that they can explain nearly any possible set of results. My feelings exactly. I do both behavioral work and neuroimaging work, and it truly irks me that neuroimaging work gets more "automatic" respect simply because it has pretty pictures of brains.This message has been edited by Zhimbo, 10-16-2005 08:58 PM

I don't know what I said that gave you that impression. I was just wondering if there's a fundamental difference between meteorology and psychology, or if differences are merely in the way we perceive them.One reason I've been trying to describe behind why I think experimental psychology sometimes has elements of pseudoscience is this element of perception; even cognitive scientists often speak in terms of free will and folk psychology. Part of it is simply a matter of language; part of it is actually imprecise thinking, I believe.

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but you didn't have to explain the difference between clinical and research i'm an academic too, remember.

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It's probably my shortcoming, but the impression you gave when you first entered the conversation is that you didn't actually know what research Psychology did, or maybe that there was any sort of psychological study that wasn't clinical in nature. The statements you made such as, "No, psychology is not a science.", and "can they control their experiments? no.", led me rather strongly to believe that you really didn't understand Psychology as a field.Again, I may have misunderstood you, but this was my impression nevertheless.

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and yes i suppose if that is the case it would make all the difference as clinicians tend to be more interested in a quick diagnosis ...

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It's not that "clinicians are interested in a quick diagnosis".It's more the issue of clinicians not being scientists.Scientists are trained to develop and test theory. That's what they do.Clinicians rarely do this, if ever.Scientists and Clinicians have very, very different skill sets.

when i said they can't control their experiments i mean that they can't pick and choose all the aspects affecting the psyche of a given test subject. hard science depends on exacting standards that psychology can't deliver. i'm not saying it isn't valuable... it's just not science.i quite understand it. it's merely a difference of opinion.

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hard science depends on exacting standards that psychology can't deliver.

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So, you are saying that because the error bars in Psychology are larger than in, say, Chemistry, Psychology isn't science?Is that what you're saying?The error bars in Biology and Meterorology are also larger than in Chemistry. Are these not science either?

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i'm not saying it isn't valuable... it's just not science.

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Look, haven't you been reading this thread?Yes it is.Unless you'd like to argue with journals like Science, Nature, and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among many others.

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i quite understand it. it's merely a difference of opinion.

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Well, I think that your "opinion" conflicts quite markedly with reality.

meh.

I thought as much, "academic".

Hey Schraf,I know I haven't got back to Zhimbo yet, but there are things going on that don't have to do with "larger error bars." For example,Take the fMRI technology, the data processing techniques, and the derivations of results from it. There are two big problems that I have with many studies:

1. Arbitrary choosing of p-values for "significance" of activation - when it comes to processing fMRI data, suddenly P < 0.05 no longer fits the bill; experimenters choose their own P-values, usually <0.01 or <0.001. How do they choose it? Honestly, it depends on the experimenter. I worked in a lab where P was chosen based on HOW THE RESULT MATCHED WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR. And I know this isn't uncommon; P-values are usually chosen so that activation patterns are localized. This is not science.
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   I couldn't tell if this was happening in the paper that you cited; my sophistication level of data analysis is still not high. ROI analysis was done at P < 0.01.
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2. The failure to reject the null hypothesis is taken as evidence FOR the null hypothesis - this is one of the fundamental no-no's of null hypothesis testing. But it often happens in fMRI studies--a failure for a region to show significant activation as compared to another condition is taken to mean that the areas were not differentially important in processing.
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   For example, in the study you cited, the lack of significant differential activation of the anterior cingulate cortex was NOT taken to mean that no differential activation was found on this trial, but rather that anterior cingulate cortex was not differentially involved. It seems clear to me that this is using a failure to reject the null hypothesis (a failure to reject that there are no processing differences) as evidence FOR the null hypothesis.
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   That's not scientific where I come from.

Sorry, it's been bothering me for a while; I had to get that off my chest.Ben

So, because of these points, Psychology is a pseudoscience?

Whether we laben psychology "science" or "pseudoscience", it doesn't really matter to me. The REAL purpose is to point out how psychology is different than other sciences, and to show real problems in the field. Let's be intellectually honest and transparent about how things work in the field.That way people don't have a false impression about what's going on in the study of mind....With that said, these are definitely methodological concerns for the "harder" scientific parts of psychology. There are other problems with other imaging methods. Real problems.Then there's theoretical concerns that I was bringing up before, that I haven't fleshed out well with Zhimbo. I'll try to work on that. There are some really important problems in there too. Let's bring them out!Ben