Scientific status of psychology: Methods, benefits and costs of being a science

Overview

How each approach studies behaviour, the benefits of scientific status to society and the economy, and its costs: reductionism, determinism, demand characteristics and scientism, ending with whether psychology is a science.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Name three reforms psychology has adopted in response to the replication crisis, and explain why they can be read as evidence for its scientific status.

   Model answer

   Pre-registration of hypotheses and analysis plans, sharing of data and materials so others can check the analysis, and larger samples chosen by considering statistical power in advance; detecting the problem and publicly changing its methods is exactly the self-correction that science claims for itself, and psychology has led other disciplines in adopting these reforms.

2. 2

   Which methods does the biological approach use, and how scientific are they?

   Model answer

   Laboratory experiments, brain scanning, twin and adoption studies, drug trials and animal research, which give objective, quantifiable data; the main limitation is that scan data are correlational, so an association between an area and a behaviour does not establish a cause.

3. 3

   What did Watson (1913) argue psychology should study, and how scientific is the behaviourist approach that followed?

   Model answer

   He argued it should study only observable, measurable behaviour, because introspective reports cannot be checked by anyone else; the resulting use of controlled procedures, operational definitions and replicable results is highly scientific, but it excludes thought and emotion and relies on artificial settings.

4. 4

   How does the cognitive approach study something it cannot observe, and what is the weakness of that strategy?

   Model answer

   It infers internal processes from measurable behaviour under controlled conditions, as when Loftus and Palmer (1974) varied a single verb and measured speed estimates in miles per hour to infer that memory had been reconstructed; because the process is never observed directly, more than one internal account usually fits the same result.

5. 5

   Which methods does the psychodynamic approach rely on, and what problems do they create?

   Model answer

   Case studies, clinical interviews, dream analysis and free association, as in Bowlby's (1944) retrospective case histories; these give rich individual data but depend on the researcher's own interpretation, cannot readily be replicated, and rarely yield predictions that could be refuted.

6. 6

   Which methods dominate the positive approach, and what are their strengths and weaknesses?

   Model answer

   Self-report questionnaires and large-scale surveys analysed statistically, as in Myers and Diener (1995); these allow very large samples and quantitative comparison, but happiness is defined by what people say about themselves, which invites social desirability.

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