Features of science

• Psychology has a reputation for not being a proper science amongst some members of the scientific community
• Science is known for only accepting ideas after being tested carefully many times under strict laboratory conditions
• Science


  • This results in high confidence in the validity of findings and of the underlying theory
  • It is possible to perform the same laboratory experiment multiple times and get exactly the same results
• Problem for psychologists


  We study behavior and the brain, which is the most complex structure in the universe and has the feature of knowing it's being observed and changing its behavior in response
• The observers themselves are brains observing other brains, making it relatively easy to be objective when studying a rock or a cell but many psychological questions are deeply important to us on an emotional level
• Psychology is a very new science, only around 100 years old, but there are features about how psychological research has been conducted in the last few decades that make it much more scientific and respected
• Empirical method


  Factual knowledge comes from experience, not speculation, logical argument, belief, or directly from theory
• Objectivity


  Data should be collected and interpreted in a way that avoids bias from the researcher's own opinions or expectations
• Ensuring objectivity


  1. Using a systematic data collection process

  2. Carefully designing data collection measures

  3. Using the double blind technique

  4. Peer review to identify bias
• Control


  Controlling for extraneous variables to demonstrate a cause and effect relationship
• Replicability


  Scientists carefully recording methods and producing standardized procedures so other scientists can repeat experiments and observations
• Falsifiability


  A theory must be constructed in a way that it can be empirically tested and shown to be false
• Some of Freud's ideas are criticized as unscientific because the concepts like the id, ego, and superego are not open to empirical experimentation and falsification
• Paradigm shift


  Science develops in a series of scientific revolutions where new evidence contradicts the established shared assumptions, leading to a shift to a new way of thinking
• The most famous paradigm shift in science is the Copernican revolution, where the evidence from Galileo's telescope led to the rejection of the Earth-centered model in favor of the Sun-centered model
• Stages of scientific theory construction and hypothesis testing

  1. Observation

  2. Hypothesis construction

  3. Empirical data collection

  4. Statistical assessment

  5. Theory proposition
• The more a scientific theory can withstand attempts to test its assumptions, the more confident we are in the validity of that theory