Psychology: A Very Brief History Of Psychology

Science is the systematic study of structure and behaviour through observation and experiments. It is an intellectual and practical activity. Skinner (1965) noted that, “All scientists, whether giants or not, enable those who follow them to begin a little further along” (p.11). In the 14th century, Plato offered an alternative route to where science was; he did not see the need for observation, but instead highlighted the importance of other knowledge branches (Brysbaert & Rastle, 2009). Aristotle made the distinction between deductive and inductive reasoning, which was a different view compared to Plato. Bacon was the main defender in the 17th century for the primacy of observation, believing that knowledge should not be based around obedience …show more content…
Psychology was founded on mental philosophy, and uses scientific methods to ensure that it is a legitimate discipline. The history of psychology dates from 1879 however, it does have a past longer than this. The history and the research methods they use are core components of the discipline. Coon (2005) acknowledged that psychology is both a science and a profession, within this, he defined psychology as a scientific study of behaviour and cognitive processes (p.14). Psychology as a discipline is broadly influenced from philosophy, medicine, biological sciences and physical sciences. This means that studying factors from a biological, psychological and environmental view point gave psychology the opportunity to create more than one perspective (Passer & Smith, 2007). By creating predictions that hold across large time scales and large geographical scales furthermore illustrates the scientific nature of this …show more content…
This is the result of psychoanalysis and qualitative data, because the data psychologists collect cannot be generalised and is very unlikely to be scientific. The use of case and animal studies are severely hard to generalise as they are not always applicable to humans/all of the population and hard to prove the scientific nature of them (Fox, 2009). The social approach’s use of observations is not scientific as there is no isolation of independent variable’s to see effects on the dependant variable’s (Fox, 2009), this was shown in the study of obedience conducted by Meeus & Raajimakers (1986). The use of open-ended questionnaires creates qualitative data, again reducing the scientific standing of psychological research. Therefore, making it harder to replicate and meaning there is no actual proof that the results researchers have found are actually correct and conclusions found cannot