Psychology: Is it a science?
- Thread starter Aaron Hepi
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Considering one of my degrees is in clinical psychology, I'm going with: yeah, it's a science. Of course that may be me being completely biased. 
- Sep 28, 2008
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Anyone who believes psychology is in any way a "lesser" or "easier" field of study has not spent time in the field.
I think the point is psychology isn't perhaps solely science but more interdisciplinary. Ultimately if we define science as truly *hard* science, namely, things you can prove using tests about the physical/material world, then many things we hold useful today aren't science.
The closest approximation to science when we care about concepts that don't correspond one to one with physical data is when we measure other kinds of data -- that kind of data-oriented analysis is what led to the Five Factor Model and such tools.
These are NOT strict physical science. They are quantitatively very well-tested tools though, meaning they are measuring something that's not nonsense....but does not necessarily correspond to a material object in full.
However, they are sufficiently data-driven and thus actually we do see legitimate science able to get at their insights -- there's lots of research on the Big 5 and actual neuroscience. But the point is we should not aim to REDUCE psychology/personality to neuroscience. It interplays with philosophy for instance. How people see things and make meaning out of them is often rigorously conceptualized in philosophy.
Jung was very philosophical, which is why some of his types theory is appealing. But he was a bit loose on science, so it takes some work to resolve his insights from a bunch of interesting ideas to something that can be used to really study types of people.
The closest approximation to science when we care about concepts that don't correspond one to one with physical data is when we measure other kinds of data -- that kind of data-oriented analysis is what led to the Five Factor Model and such tools.
These are NOT strict physical science. They are quantitatively very well-tested tools though, meaning they are measuring something that's not nonsense....but does not necessarily correspond to a material object in full.
However, they are sufficiently data-driven and thus actually we do see legitimate science able to get at their insights -- there's lots of research on the Big 5 and actual neuroscience. But the point is we should not aim to REDUCE psychology/personality to neuroscience. It interplays with philosophy for instance. How people see things and make meaning out of them is often rigorously conceptualized in philosophy.
Jung was very philosophical, which is why some of his types theory is appealing. But he was a bit loose on science, so it takes some work to resolve his insights from a bunch of interesting ideas to something that can be used to really study types of people.
Just reading thru the thread, I think niffer's remark fits very well with mine. The study of the mind can ultimately appeal to people from many walks, including mystics, who don't even claim to be producing rational knowledge and in fact expressly are going outside those bounds.
Personality psychology to me fits best within the interface of quantitatively rigorous scale-construction where we really figure out statistical variables measuring the shared variance of various sub-traits that constitute our intuitive picture of a super-trait (e.g. the many things we feel form a "picture" of a feeling type)... along with good and solid philosophical study that attempts to conceptualize and define what constitutes the psychological values of different types and how they inter-relate.
It can then be corroborated with neuroscience to figure out what material factors are influencing the statistical variables we're measuring (e.g. there's lots of study of Extroversion and the brain).
Still, lexical methods like the big 5's will never be wholly "hard" science because lexical methods rely on the idea that human-invented terminology and clustering patterns within it are likely to measure important aspects of personality -- while one can certainly take a biological stance and hypothesize that a motivational bent likely corresponds to a "survival strategy," which ultimately is brought about by some neurochemical differences, there's some use to giving free conceptual license to measure various aspects of personality that roughly correlate highly with a neuroscientific variable, but warrant some philosophical considerations to really spell out how the motivational strategy/orientation looks in real life.
Personality psychology to me fits best within the interface of quantitatively rigorous scale-construction where we really figure out statistical variables measuring the shared variance of various sub-traits that constitute our intuitive picture of a super-trait (e.g. the many things we feel form a "picture" of a feeling type)... along with good and solid philosophical study that attempts to conceptualize and define what constitutes the psychological values of different types and how they inter-relate.
It can then be corroborated with neuroscience to figure out what material factors are influencing the statistical variables we're measuring (e.g. there's lots of study of Extroversion and the brain).
Still, lexical methods like the big 5's will never be wholly "hard" science because lexical methods rely on the idea that human-invented terminology and clustering patterns within it are likely to measure important aspects of personality -- while one can certainly take a biological stance and hypothesize that a motivational bent likely corresponds to a "survival strategy," which ultimately is brought about by some neurochemical differences, there's some use to giving free conceptual license to measure various aspects of personality that roughly correlate highly with a neuroscientific variable, but warrant some philosophical considerations to really spell out how the motivational strategy/orientation looks in real life.