Is Psychology science?

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Is Psychology a science?

  • Yes.

    Votes: 57 47.5%
  • No.

    Votes: 44 36.7%
  • Maybe?

    Votes: 23 19.2%

  • Total voters
    120
I think that all psychology courses fall somewhere on a continuum between "Pure Science" on the left and "Pure Philosophy" on the right, with many courses (like Neuro) edging very close to the left.

That said, I think a balanced education will include a sampling of courses from the left, middle, and right sides of the continuum.....regardless of the discipline studied, as all can help one gain insight into the human condition.
 
If science is defined as purely experimental, you'd have to throw out theoretical physics with the sub-branches of psychology that aren't using experiments, as well as toss out case studies, because they wouldn't have the power to conclude that a treatment works for that disease based on one person.

Science is science. Whether you're fiddling with equations or actively testing hypotheses in a lab, you're studying the world around you in a mostly quantitative way. Yes, some sciences are more or less difficult in undergraduate studies. If psychology isn't a science because it isn't as difficult as neuroscience, then I'll play my applied mathematics card and assert that biology and chemistry have little scientific merit because most of the research isn't developing new methods of modeling the world and its components using quantum theory.
 
"My major is harder/better/blahblahblah than yours"

Oh look. This thread.
 
1) A high GPA in neuroscience/neurobiology is far more impressive than one in psychology (which is typically regarded as an easier major)

....preferably admissions data by major demonstrating that "more impressive" majors have higher admit stats.....


OP:

Neuroscience depends primarily on your college's offerings. At some colleges, it's bio-focused, at others it's psych-focused, while at others it maybe Comp Sci-focused. (UCLA has a program in the latter category.)

In general, psych courses will not count for bcpm, but neuro courses offered by the psych department may be bcpm.
 
All of modern psychology is scientific. People who say that it is not, haven't studied psychology or have a media-influenced view of it. Take a course in experimental/cognitive psychology studying all those experiments and models on perception, attention, memory, language recognition and production, categorization, reasoning, problem-solving, decision-making, cognition-emotion interactions etc. informed by computational/neural-network models and see how scientific it is(e.g, Tversky and Kahneman have won the nobel-prize for economics for their pioneering cog. psych experimental research on decision-making).

Psychology gave-rise to "cognitive neuroscience" e.g. investigating cognitive functions by using cog. psychology's tasks and methods (e.g. digit span, go/no-go tasks, object/face-recognition etc.) while subjects undergo functional imaging, cognitive-evoked potentials using EEG etc. Then you have physiological psychology (synomymous with modern behavioural neuroscience) and the possibility of conducting invasive research with animals (e.g. after stereotactic surgery or single-cell recordings), investigating e.g. synaptic plasticity and learning or emotional-autonomic processes. Even the more "social/developmental" aspects of psychology are experimental. Search Milgram's famous experiments on obedience to authority, Asch's on social conformity and a lot of exciting modern experimental research on social cognition (which IMO has significant mental-health applications, e.g. how we attribute causality and its' relation to depressive and psychotic states). Also a lot of crucial experimental research on kids e.g. on how they learn and organize their perceptions or linquistic concepts.


Psychology is as scientific as it can be. It is the ideal subject if you want to think about the structure and function of abstract functions by conducting empirical research. I have also taken biochem and physiology courses and while biochemistry can be more daunting, e.g. in memorizing every little thing of a metabolic pathway, cognitive psychology (e.g. how human deductive and inductive reasoning works, how concepts are organized in semantic memory, or how we recognize objects and people) can demand a much more analytical-type of thinking. I personally think it as very similar to physiology (with the ways of thinking and the type of reasoning for conducting experiments) with the main difference being that in physiology you get much more straightforward linear models (e.g. cardio-vascular dynamics) whereas in experimental psychology you get more non-linear multifactorial functions (e.g. factors thay affect memory-recall and memory-recognition)

Have a look at the journals of experimental psychology (like "human perception and performance" or "learning, memory and cognition")



So, just major in whatever you like but obvious combos (as others have suggested) are major neuroscience/physiology, minor psychology or the opposite (although the first one would probably be easier for med-school). There is overlap in many ways (common courses)
 
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It's a pseudoscience.

If you are going to make a statement like that back it up.

Explain why you group it into pseudoscience? That would mean it was some belief system or actions based upon something that has no supporting evidence and does not operate on the scientific method.

So what...you think psychologists and psychiatrists just run up and guess without any type of method or testing? If you say yes to that then you have not done your homework.

Astrology is a good example of a pseudoscience. Psychology is a science.

Go do some research THEN make a post like that.
 
If you are going to make a statement like that back it up.

Explain why you group it into pseudoscience? That would mean it was some belief system or actions based upon something that has no supporting evidence and does not operate on the scientific method.

So what...you think psychologists and psychiatrists just run up and guess without any type of method or testing? If you say yes to that then you have not done your homework.

Astrology is a good example of a pseudoscience. Psychology is a science.

Go do some research THEN make a post like that.
I really wouldn't bother, you're not going to get a serious response...
 
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