Evidence In Psychology

Although humankind has been developing and using scientific methodology for hundreds, if not thousands of years, until the late 19th century we had not begun to turn our focus inward and study other humans. To this point, sciences had been formulated to better understand our physical and environmental surroundings. To their credit, early thinkers achieved considerable advancements in understanding sciences like physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics, and many of the discoveries throughout history in these fields are still withstanding today. As these early branches of science progressed in substance, so too did the procedures and standards of actually acquiring the information, or knowledge. Overtime a body of techniques was built …show more content…
Empirical evidence should not be influenced by argument or prior belief. Evidence is normally gathered through observation and experiment, then tested and examined, and interpreted with some level of expertise or experience. After some level of predictability and recurrence, conclusions can begin to be made. When considering psychology, the study of human behavior and the workings of the mind, it’s not hard to see how interpretation can lead to uncertainties and disagreements in research and findings. This is particularly problematic for psychology, because along with outcomes being able to be interpreted differently on a person to person basis, initial preconceptions and opinions can also vary widely. In other words, there is much more room for conflict when evaluating and interpreting psychological research than there is in, for example, biological research. It can be argued that this room for conflict has prevented psychology as a whole from moving forward by hindering the acceptance of principal and predominant theories that would serve as building blocks for the field as a whole. For instance, the discovery and acceptance of the atom led to new theories about protons, electrons, and elements. The compilation and expansion of these subsequent theories are the reason we can enjoy things like electricity and energy …show more content…
Where other sciences seem to have grown in a more linear, straightforward fashion, psychology seems to be growing outward, more so than upward. This could of course be attributed to psychology being relatively young at 150 or so years old, as compared to the aforementioned sciences whose roots trace back millenniums. However, it can also be argued that this is due to the general lack of agreement, or gaps in interpretation, that have prevented the field from establishing a set of near universally accepted theories for future research to be based off of. Another possible explanation is simply that people change. As psychology has progressed, society’s norms and customs have changed drastically, and with it human behavior has naturally changed as well. While the idea of an electron in its environment in the year 1900 was essentially the same in the year 2000, the description of a human being in their environment most definitely was not. In fact, one could certainly argue that internal states and thought processes have changed just as much as the external environment, both obviously influencing and changing behavior overtime. These changes also affect the nature of how behavior is observed and interpreted. People, both in their outward behavior and their internal processes have, and will continue to change as time progresses, impacting the field as a whole. From this perspective,