Is psychology a science?

Question

There's fierce debate about this. Even some psychologists saying it isn't. But I define science as predictive and like the Mindhunter guys, it can be very predictive.

Stoner710 · Accepted Answer

Kinda it’s a soft science and pretty new and people who practice psychology typically don’t know what they’re talking about. Like we drug boys claiming they have ADHD when the reality is it’s natural and very common for boys to want to run around and brake thing and make toy guns and swords out of sticks they find on the ground. Psychologist tend to label these action and diagnosed ADHD in the little boy rather then think “oh this is naturally how little boys behave”. So we feed them a bunch of drugs to get them to calm down so they can pay attention in school and teachers don’t have to deal with naturally hyper boys. This is why you see ADHD diagnosis a lot more in little boys and you do little girls. Psychology unfortunately has basically become a scam for the pharmaceutical companies to get rich by popping your children full of drugs. Now with gender dysphoria to pharmaceutical companies are getting even more rich because they’re encouraging parents to transition to children and when you cut a little boy‘s penis off it tends to have negative side effects which forces them to need medical treatment for the rest of there what will be short lives while big Pharma gets rich off of their suffering which big Pharma caused in the first place.

NathanDavis · Accepted Answer

Psychology is considered a social science, yes a SOCIAL science in definition

however the field of psychology has never met the basic requirements to be a truly rigorous scientific field...

besides the one you mentioned, predictability... you also need to have a consistent and reliable testability, reproducibility, quantifiability, the ability to conduct a very strict protocol of experimentation (which is where most "schools of psychology" will disagree and "fail" to meet) and a few more things I forgot since I was in high-school, lol

so yes and no... it is a science, but it is not

Jessica405 · Accepted Answer

Curses! I chose A by accident but meant B. It is not a science as it is subjective.

A science is repeatable. Math is repeatable. 2 + 2 usually = 4. Unless you use modulo math. In physics, experiments are repeatable. Mechanics, chemistry, electronics ets are all sciences.

Psychology is not necessarily repeatable, so is not a science.

RagnarRedbeard · Answer

It’s a soft science, as in the results of any study are open to interpretation. It‘s not a hard science like math for example.

ArtemisSilver · Answer

Yes, but it's a rather poorly understood and highly error prone field. Recently a study proved that for depression in the majority of cases the standard treatment of SSRIs was barely better than placebo.

We're going to have to do a lot more research before we can say that the field is mature and broadly correct.

Some aspects like CBT and talk therapy have been shown to be beneficial. I think there needs to be more research into the applied use of magic mushrooms for therapy.

exitseven · Answer

it is a science but not enough is known about it so there is still a lot of unpredictability in it.

msc545 · Answer

Yes and no - some of the research is fairly predictive, but the clinical side of it is not scientific and is actually more like art.

Anonymous · Answer

It's a soft or social science, not a hard or physical science.

Is psychology a science?

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