Could or should psychology be called a science? Essay

The advantages of calling psychology a science are huge. It allows us to state that it contains objective facts, correct our mistakes and build on previous discoveries. However many refute giving psychology the tile of ‘a science’ believing that humans are far too complex in their processes to be explained in generalised terms. The key assumptions of ‘science’ are; Invariance, in science a set of laws don’t change, Determinism, meaning that everything can be explained using these laws and that there is a reason for everything and finally Operationalism, trusting in an objective and accurate set of measured variables. Many psychologists believe that these key principals conflict with those of human cognitions; which are often complex and seem to fail to follow any set rules of nature. People inevitably change over time; this fact challenges the principal of ‘Invariance’ from the scientific point of view. However there is a difference in changes found on behaviour and those found in ‘laws’. For example trends of music have changed with time and culture, but the underlying psychological cognitions behind those changes haven’t been altered; group pressure still remains. Science asserts that one set of rules can apply for everyone; determinism. However a psychologist would state that its very founding principals of the ‘psyche’ means that people follow many different sets of rules and cannot be forced into one category due to differing levels of cognitions. This might be challenged be saying that science chooses to follow a set of rules that are as simple as they can be, but that psychology might have to have a more complex set of rules in order to appreciate human differences. An analogy used to support this is that, â€Å"In spelling ‘I’ before ‘E’ doesn’t always work, but the more complex rule of ‘I’ before ‘E’ except after ‘C’ does. † Finally the challenge to the idea of ‘operationalism’ comes form the fact that many psychologists believe that you can’t observe and measure thoughts and feelings directly, as they are internal. However science might say that you can infer the thoughts and feelings of a person from their external behaviour. Many psychologists would state that ‘psychologies inability to predict human behaviour could be taken as proof that psychology isn’t a science because science works on the principals that if you observe something enough times you will be able to understand it and predict what will happen in the future. ‘ Science however, began like psychology; without all the answers and indeed even modern medical science cannot predict all the answers e. g. Modern medicinal science doesn’t know how to cure cancer because they don’t know how it will react to different drugs. We would demand a far more complex analysis from a psychologist than we would from other scientists. We might ask a psychologist what a human will do, this question could be considered as broad as asking a physicist what will happen to a specific drop of water in the ocean. There are a great deal of variables influencing human behaviour, therefore making it unrealistic to expect that people’s behaviour could be predicted from observing just one or two variables, similarly in physics; the behaviour of particles can’t be predicted due to the fact that not all of the determinants of the particles behaviour can be observed at once. Psychology cannot be discounted as a science just due to the fact that we don’t know the cause of something. As a psychologist you should appreciate the fact that humans have an inability to know everything and just because we don’t know the cause it doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. If psychology were a science there would be some key issues that would need sorting before people accepted its status. The knowledge gained through psychological research might be mis-used. Given to those in political or economic power psychological research could mean that humans have an inability to defend themselves against certain ideas that were being forced upon them. If psychology became a science then humans would have to be tested upon to gain more accurate results and to create complex laws about them. These experiments might be unethical, for example we have seen the research that Milgram did, however even though it was controversial the participants agreed that they were unharmed and that they were glad to have participated. There would also be strict ethical guidelines should humans be tested on. Many psychologists believe that the reason psychology shouldn’t be a science is due to the mysterious and uncertain nature of it. The fact that we don’t understand ‘love’ might make it seem more magical and exciting, something that appeals to human nature. The advantages to understanding something like love would mean that we could prevent areas such as divorce, break up and heartbreak, causing a less painful world for humans. The complexity of areas of psychology, such as love and hate, means that inevitably the mystery and human mis-understanding surrounding such phenomena would be unlikely to be removed.