Debates in psychology Is psychology a science What

Debates in psychology • Is psychology a science?

What you need to know: • Describe the debate over what science is, including how far psychology fits the definition • Evaluate whether psychology should be called a science, including where ethnocentrism and cultural relativity fit.

Psychology and scientific subject matter • Consider the following questions • Are the subjects of psychology scientific? • Are the methods scientific?

Term explanation example Hypothesis writing Drawing an idea from something and making a statement about what is then expected from it Noticing lots of white swans , hypothesis: all swans are white Empirical testing Testing the idea against reality Looking at lots of swans and checking that they are white falsification Trying to prove a hypothesis is false You can only prove that they are not all white not that they are all white reductionism Reducing complex issues to The actions of a drug are small parts focused on a small part of the brain controls Reducing bias by controlling variables Biases include experimenter effects, situational and participant variables and wider issues eg ethnocentrism.

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To be scientific • Research needs to be • Objective • Falsifiable • Replicable

Psychology and science • Falsifiability – inferential stats indicate the extent to which our results are due to chance and not a real difference/relationship • Paradigms -there should be a single paradigm if psychology is truly a science. Psychology has a number of different paradigms so is thought to be pre science. • Discourses -lab situations don’t go very far in understanding discourse

Maybe there are reasons for not ‘doing science’ • Holism – the whole is more than the sum of the parts, maybe we should break everything done to its constituent parts! • Humanism – we are more than just specimins • Although scientific method is reliable it is not always valid • Social constructionism – we should study constructs which will tell us more about real life.

How scientific are the 5 as approaches? • • • The social approach The cognitive approach The psychodynamic approach The biological approach The learning approach

examzone 1. With reference to one approach in psychology describe ways in which it is scientific 2. Explain why you think psychology is not scientific. You have 45 minutes in the LRC to produce a Power. Point presentation answering these 2 questions. You will present this in the next session. Please also produce a handout for the other members of the class to fill in as they listen to your presentation.