psychology as a 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
• This results in high confidence in the validity of findings and of the underlying theory
• The problem for psychologists is that they study behavior and the brain, which is the most complex structure in the universe and has the particular feature of knowing it's being observed and changing its behavior in response
• Researchers can be deeply invested in finding a particular result, which can cloud their interpretation of observations
• Psychology is a relatively new science, only around 100 years old, but there are features of psychological research in the last few decades that make it more scientific and respected
• Empirical method


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


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


  • Using systematic data collection, carefully designed measures, and the double-blind technique
  • Peer review to identify bias
• Control


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


  Researchers recording methods and procedures so others 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 through scientific revolutions, where new evidence and theories that contradict the old paradigm eventually lead to the majority of the scientific community accepting the 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 acceptance of the heliocentric model over the previously dominant geocentric model
• Stages of scientific theory construction and hypothesis testing


  1. Observation

  2. Hypothesis formation

  3. Empirical data collection

  4. Statistical assessment

  5. Theory proposition

  6. Hypothesis testing

  7. Theory refinement
• The more a scientific theory can withstand attempts to test its assumptions, the more confident we are in the validity of that theory
• The researcher can use either an inductive (bottom-up) or deductive (top-down) approach to theory construction and hypothesis testing
• The author has created 8 tutorial videos covering the A-level research methods section, which are available to patrons on patreon