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Author | Topic: Is experimental psychology science? | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Ben! Member (Idle past 1425 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
Hi Chiroptera,
I'll try to respond to your post here, like you suggested
Psychologists make observations in the real world, like the behavior of a person, her answers to some sort of questionaire, her descriptions of how she feels or her interpretations of her actions, and so forth. 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
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5 |
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:
What's the operational definition of "emotion" here, and how does that relate to robinrohan's usage of emotion?
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:
Experiments are usually done in lab environments, where confounding factors can be controlled. I thought I could assume this experimental point.
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 would claim that anywhere you see folk psychology, whatever's being investigated is not scientific. Folk psychology pervades cognitive science in motivating the hypotheses, in identifying confounds, in being parts of completely underspecified models, and in being the preferred method of "glossing" results.
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 isn't very interesting to me because it doesn't explain behavior; it just describes it.
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:
The only point I wanted to make is that Fitt's law doesn't address things at the level that I'm questioning of whether it's science. You can do studies like that all day, come up with mathematical fits, but in the end it doesn't address the mechanisms underlying any behavior. It's too complex.
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:
Until then, we'll be stuck with protoscience or pseudoscience.
I think your concept of science is a little too narrow.
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Chiroptera Inactive Member |
quote: 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? "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
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DBlevins Member (Idle past 3802 days) Posts: 652 From: Puyallup, WA. Joined: |
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?
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Zhimbo Member (Idle past 6038 days) Posts: 571 From: New Hampshire, USA Joined: |
"So, now that you've shown that research papers are not accessible to the layman," 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.
"What's the operational definition of "emotion" here and how does that relate to robinrohan's usage of emotion?" 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.
Making RR retract is just debate and sophistry. 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.
" I've never seen any research paper address in any rigorous way "feelings". Are you familiar with Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis?
I'm pretty sure that the paper below does not address "emotions" in a layman's sense, but a very strict operational definition where emotion=behavior 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.
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Zhimbo Member (Idle past 6038 days) Posts: 571 From: New Hampshire, USA Joined: |
"Fitt's law isn't very interesting to me because it doesn't explain behavior; it just describes it." 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?
"And you can take it into a laboratory environment, remove the confounds, and given the underlying theory, predict with high precision what the motion will be." 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.
"A real problem in cognitive science is the validity of extending lab studies to actual human behavior that happens "in the field." There is not nearly the same problem in something like ballistic motion." Sure it's a "problem". Does that make experimental psychology a pseudoscience?
"Tell me how Baddelley's Working memory model accounts for variability. Do you actually find it to be "scientific", or a complete, utter gloss? I find it to lack rigor" 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.
"I would claim that anywhere you see folk psychology, whatever's being investigated is not scientific." 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).
That's why I prefer computational models. They're predictive. 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.
" And that's why I prefer behavioral measurements, I'm OK with some imaging measurements... sometimes" 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
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1425 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
Are you argueing that the processes that make up the 'mind' are not physical and/or caused? 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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nator Member (Idle past 2196 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: 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.
quote: 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.
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3954 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
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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nator Member (Idle past 2196 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: 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?
quote: 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.
quote: Well, I think that your "opinion" conflicts quite markedly with reality.
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3954 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
meh.
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nator Member (Idle past 2196 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
I thought as much, "academic".
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1425 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
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:
Sorry, it's been bothering me for a while; I had to get that off my chest. Ben
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nator Member (Idle past 2196 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
So, because of these points, Psychology is a pseudoscience?
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1425 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
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
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