Is Psychology All Bunk?

I've been following a bit of a debate recently on one of the other main boards I frequent and lately there has been a bit of a debate between the board owner and another poster on the legitimacy of psychology as a proper science.While I hold the view that the majority is fairly hit and miss and pseudoscientific, there are some parts that tie with the more accurate neuroscience realm and are actually useful and somewhat testable.The old thread I question is here.Now Mike (Darth Wong) is an engineer and a staunch scientists, hence the board having a forum just for such subjects (analysing sci-fi weapons etc. requires good science knowledge ) but I'm unsure whether he really knows much on psychology given his good knowledge in debating and winning against fundies and general science inept idiots.So what says you?

Psychology is a young science trying to work in a very hard area, and influential founders such as Jung and Freud did a wonderful job of getting it off on the wrong foot. However, more modern psychology has come a long way; in particular with Evolutionary Psychology such as that popularised by Stephen Pinker.Improvements in neuroscience and the development of sounder experimental techniques will also help push it forward. My big hope is that it will drop some of it's pseudo-medical trappings and develop more useful diagnostic tools (most mental 'illnesses' aren't).2p delivered, as requested.

I'm just curious about the way neuroscience can really explain this stuff with much better accuracy. Given the biochemical processes and general physiology of the mind being worked out, it strikes me as the successor to psychology/psychiatry simply because it's not littered with journals posting papers based on fairly arbitrary findings. Here was a follow up thread to the previous one which Mike didn't seem to respond to in the end, likely because he was busy elsewhere with family and work. You have to wonder when such integral parts of the practice are debunked does it really amount to anything at all.I still see it as a soft science much like anything that isn't the Big 3 (Biology, Chemistry & Physics) and professes to being a science. It pains me to see business science and computer science being actual subjects now.[This message has been edited by Admiral Valdemar, 12-16-2003]

You may be confusing psychiatry and psychology here.------------------
Common sense isn't

That's my fault, I really mean to question both fields since they're linked. Overall my qualms are with psychology since the posted link debate is attacking that, but psychiatry still seems equally vulnerable.

I was taught (the theoretical side of) Psychiatry as a branch of Psychology.

Hmmm... I think Neuroscience is to psychology as Physics and Chemistry are to Biology. Sure you can boil psychological questions down to answers in brain chemistry, but it probably won't give you meaningful answers.

Actually, he seems to be confusing Clinical Psychology with all of Psychology, like confusing Medicine with Biology. It's a common mistake. I try to avoid telling people that I do psychology to avoid that whole confusion. (Actually, I usually qualify it as Cognitive Psychology, which at least gets folks to pause before making assumptions).Neuroscience answers different questions than Psychology, although the disciplines overlap a great deal. Can Neuroscience teach us the best way to study for an exam? No, not yet, maybe never. Psychology has had valuable things to say on the subject for decades.There's bunk in clinical psychology, to be sure, and the rest of psychology certainly is not as free of bunk as older sciences. Certainly I and every psychologist I interact with on a daily basis are amazed that certain ideas and practices survive at all within our discipline.But, as one might suspect, my answer to the title of this thread is a resounding "No!". Well, "No, except for that crap over there."[This message has been edited by Zhimbo, 12-16-2003]

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I'm just curious about the way neuroscience can really explain this stuff with much better accuracy.

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Using only neuroscience, tell me:
1. How I should study for an exam.
2. Why people believe in astrology.
3. The best way to organize an airplane cockpit.

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Using only neuroscience, tell me:
1. How I should study for an exam.
2. Why people believe in astrology.
3. The best way to organize an airplane cockpit.

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Bugger.I guess that is the realm of psychology, the stuff that deals outside of exact science at least. But it still doesn't, as far as I know, hold the same merit as the Big 3 if only due to the lack of maths in it. I hear a common argument to determine the complexity and usefulness of a scientific subject is to see if calculus is used much which it is in the Big 3, though I haven't seen anything of the like in standard psychology.There's also the problem with reproducibility since one person's mind can be totally different to another and so even more blurry lines are found. The nature of the subject I suppose is what dooms it to being a lot harder to define.

Quote: "Hmmm... I think Neuroscience is to psychology as Physics and Chemistry are to Biology. Sure you can boil psychological questions down to answers in brain chemistry, but it probably won't give you meaningful answers. "So, are you saying that a psychiatrist can likely prescribe a medicine that may help you see less pink elephants than previously, but it takes a psychologist to concoct a seemingly believable reason why the ones you still see are pink?

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I hear a common argument to determine the complexity and usefulness of a scientific subject is to see if calculus is used much which it is in the Big 3, though I haven't seen anything of the like in standard psychology.

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The Origin of Species doesn't contain a single equation, but is the basis for the most important unifying theory of all of the life sciences.

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There's also the problem with reproducibility since one person's mind can be totally different to another and so even more blurry lines are found.

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Ah, except that that's not true.People's minds are much more predictable and similar than non-Psychologists realize.I'll let the husband elaborate for you in another message.

It just occurred to me that the scientific method, which is basically a method of inquiry which seeks to eliminate as many of our human thought biases and logic errors as possible, would not be possible without psychology.

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But it still doesn't, as far as I know, hold the same merit as the Big 3 if only due to the lack of maths in it.

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You don't seriously propose that we assign "merit" to science based on the amount of mathematics, do you?By that standard, Darwin is worthless. Creationists, rejoice!Don't find math in Psychology? You aren't looking too hard. When I search on "mathematical model" or "computational model" on the PsycINFO database, both searches max out to the limit of my search engine (1000 items). "logarithmic" returns 634 items, which means it occurs in the title or abstract (on the first search results page was a dissertation called "The linear classification function versus the logistic discriminant function in a three-population situation with a mixture of continuous and categorical variables.") I've taken a course exclusively on computational models. A classic from my field is the two-volume set called "Parallel Distributed Processing" by Rumelhart and McClelland, which should have more than enough math to satisfy you for a while.Two Nobel Prizes have gone to psychologists: both in Economics.Now, does all this math support the merit of Psychology? Of course not. I can think of many ways of measuring merit: Successful application to real world problems, sucessful predictions, growth of reliable knowledge, etc. Seeing how much math there is doesn't seem like the way to go. Some of the silliest flim-flam out there is full of math.

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There's also the problem with reproducibility since one person's mind can be totally different to another and so even more blurry lines are found

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While there is certainly inter-subject variability, your contention that "one person's mind can be totally differnt to another" is not supported by the data. Evolutionary psychology suggests why: the human mind is an adaptation, a set of tools that were useful during evolution. One would expect some variability, but also considerable consistency, and I would argue that this is indeed the case.There is a lot in Psychology that is hard to quantify, and that can make scientific study more difficult, but this is orthogonal to the "merit" of Psychology. I'm the first to admit that there's more than enough borderline science and even sometimes pseudoscience tolerated in at least some neighborhoods of psychology, but there's also a lot of simple chauvinism against psychology from folks who principally think of Sigmund Freud when they think of psychology.

I think Admiral Valdemar's comments are a bit reductionistic. One can have a rigorous science of psychology while treating the brain's operations as a "black box". Consider condensed-matter and gas-state physics and chemistry. This sort of subject can be treated in a very rigorous way while treating the internal workings of atoms as "black boxes". In fact, before the mid-twentieth-century, that's how they were treated. When Dmitri Mendeleev predicted the properties of some undiscovered elements, he did not know a thing about quantum chemistry. Yet he succeeded.But from quantum chemistry, one can derive all of the aforementioned physics. One can find the sizes of atoms and the configurations and energies of chemical bonds from first principles, rather than treating them as "fudge factors" to be found experimentally.[This message has been edited by lpetrich, 12-17-2003]