emergence of psychology as a science

• Modern psychology is able to claim to be scientific, which is an advantage to them. It uses natural sciences to help to control, understand and predict certain  behaviours. All of the approaches that help to predict these behaviours use scientific methods, and they are highly controlled but in an unbiased way. Further suggesting through the 20th century it had created itself some scientific discipline.
• Some of the approaches that are used in psychology don’t use objective data, limiting the validity of the experiments and studies making it less scientific. An example of this is the humanistic approach as it prefers not to use the scientific methods but uses the subjective methods.Also the case study used in the psychodynamic approach is not representative of all or most of the population. Also some studies use demand characteristics. Overall some scientific approaches of study of human thoughts are not always desirable or possible.
• Philosopher Thomas Khun claims that all sciences must have a paradigm, a set of assumptions and principles which all researchers have to agree on. Thomas Khun  claims that psychology is not a science as it does not have a paradigm as there is too much disagreement within psychology as a whole.
• 1980s biological approach: This approach in psychology has taken it to new levels as researchers have taken advantage of the new technology to help them to study the physiological processes of how and when they happen. In this they use scans such as MRIs, CAt, CTs, EEG. This helps researchers gain an understanding of brain activity and the effect of it on the relationship on genes and behaviour.
• 1950s cognitive approach: it gave the new generation a chance to develop a new ideology and metaphor of the human mind, comparing it to the functions of a computer. It tested the predictions of memory and attention. It was highly scientific of the aspect of discipline.
• 1900s behaviourists: John B Watson claimed that introspection developed too much of subjective data as it became very difficult to generalise and publish new laws. Watson and Skinner said the phenomena of psychology should be able to be measured and objectively observed. Behaviourists became very focused on the seeable behaviour and observed that and used carefully controlled experiments. It dominated psychology for the next 50 years.