The Importance Of Psychology As A Science

When I hear the word psychology, the first thing that pops into my mind is an image of a clinical psychologist asking questions to some guy laying on a chaise and later determining that some type of trauma in his life is causing him to act a certain way or think certain thoughts. But coming into this class and starting these chapter readings has really changed my view on the whole career field itself. I’ve always categorized psychology as a science but never did I imagine just how much of a science it really is. Although I wouldn’t rank it over sciences such as biology or chemistry, I consider psychology to be a fundamental aspect of scientific studies. Many might argue that psychology shouldn’t be consider a science because it doesn’t …show more content…
First you observe using the empirical method, a set of rules and techniques for observation (Schacter, Gilbert, Wegner, and Nock, 2015). The empirical method isn’t as simple as it seems. There are three things that make humans difficult to study; Complexity, variability, and reactivity (Schacter, Gilbert, Wegner, and Nock, 2015). Once you make your observation, you ask questions and you come up with a hypothesis which is a falsifiable prediction made by a theory (Schacter, Gilbert, Wegner, and Nock, 2015). You later make a prediction from your hypothesis and finally you test it. If the experiment you performed supports your hypothesis, then you make predictions from your results and test again. If your results don’t support your hypothesis, revise it and construct a new one. A setback many psychologists encounter when testing their hypothesis is the fact that experimentation on human beings is considered to be immoral and a crime. I personally don’t consider it to be cruel or immoral if a person has agreed to it. As long as psychologists use informed consent which is a written agreement to participate in a study made by an adult who has been informed of all the risks associated with the study (Schacter, Gilbert, Wegner, and Nock, 2015), I don’t find anything wrong with experimentation on human beings. Although psychology doesn’t deal with the amount of experimentation “hard sciences” (Wilson, 2012) such as biology or chemistry do, the studies psychologists have created have led to ground breaking discoveries that have had significant impact on the way scientist study the brain. Studies such as Karl Lashley’s rats and mazes led to behavioral neuroscience which links psychological processes to activities in the nervous system (Schacter, Gilbert, Wegner, and Nock, 2015). Before Lashley’s experiment with rats, psychologists Franz