The Validity and Reliability of Psychology:

>>8343844
It's like alchemy, a pseudo-science with mostly accidental glimpses of truth. It will eventually be replaced by something functional, objective and predictive and remembered only as a historical curiosity.

Psychometrics and IQ are the only large exception to the fact it is by its nature not reproducible and thus not science.

>>8343844
My school calls it Psychological Sciences. Emphasis on neurobiology (aka the physiology of behavior/emotion/blahblah)

>>8343844
It's one of those fuzzy disciplines that tries to follow the scientific method, but lacks rigorous foundation to actually analyze results.

So basically every psychology study is collecting data in whatever way you feel is right, then pulling whatever conclusion out of the data you feel is appropriate. And that's it. There's no greater laws to test the validity of your conclusion.

Sure, you can compare it to previous studies, but if your conclusions don't line up, it's okay
>lel all people are different
>Well we used slightly different methodologies

To put it another way

Physics:
>My results indicate energy was created in my system
>This violates the first law, I should reexamine my experimental design for flaws, correct them, then redo the experiment

Psychology:
>My results indicate energy was created in my system
>Oh man this will look so good when I publish it

I don't understand how someone can waste 4 years of college and money studying psychology. Psychology majors are very touchy about hearing the truth about their major and easily get butthurt.

>>8343972
I guess applied psychology can be useful when designing interfaces and such. Clinical psychology (cognitive) is getting really succesful in treating patients using EMDR (I had anxiety and it really helped me a lot, dis some research afterwards.). Research psychology is a joke tho

>>8343972

>people don't like it when people come up and stutter insults at them about their field

maybe you just don't like psychology because you think studying the human condition is pointless because you're bad at human-related stuff?

>>8343862
>>8343865
>>8343882

meme replies, apply yourselves

>>8343844
No
No
No
>>8343865
This.
>>8343880
If it is borrowing so heavily from other fields, psyhcology by itself is garbage.

>>8343865
psychometrics fall under the same category as the rest of psychology. It still doesnt follow the scientific method.

All it does is give rough approximations of brain functions. And the results that are given are given through tests that are literally made up through arbitrary methods.

Pseudoscience.

>>8345113
Continuing on, psychology is as a whole a field that attempts to do something that we simply cant do at this time with any sort of certainty. Human thought is too nuanced just to use our outward behavior as an indicator for anything related to it.

Neuroscience is the only field that scientifically deals with the brain.

>>8345031
>>8345120

why are you people so stubborn about it not counting when psychological theories and research are corroborated by functional brain imagining and eeg-responses though? it's not like the different fields aren't entwined and can be separated in practise. literally every decent psychologist learns a fair bit about biological and neurological psychology and most cognitive psychology is backed up by rigorous neurological proof - which together with approaches to treatment cover most of applied and clinical psychology

>>8345016
>apply yourselves
>studies psychology to learn about the human condition
kek what a great application. Protip: if it's a real science, then the application of that science will have some sort of use.

>>8343844

Anyone who seriously studied the functions of the brain, will acknowledge Psychology as a real science.

>>8345180
It has the potential to be a real science, but it isn't. The same could really be said about every science, every study is subject to some kind of bias. But in physics and chemistry, the precision of the measurements leaves little room for bias to have influence, whereas psychological studies leave a lot of room for bias.

How can you claim something is a real science if it uses no math? How can you even use the word "function" in your post without realizing how ironic that is?

>>8345164

>>then the application of that science will have some sort of use.

because mental health is a meme, right?

The problem is that they usually just do experiments and claim that they find causal relationships that apply to all humans. There is actually no scientific reason for that though, by definition inference can only be applied to a large enough, random sample of the actual population. Apart from really well done large scale surveys with pre-defined total population and an actual random sample, fuck the results.

I know there are advantages of experiments, but the reliability just sucks, in my opinion cause they violate mathematical reasoning.

I get the impression that psychology in the US and parts of Europe mainly means psychodyamic and and Freud stuff, hence the bad reputation among scientists. Where i live though most psychology taught in Universities is clinical behavioural psychology and neuro psychology and such, and in public mental health care here you would probably never encounter a freudian or psychodynamic psychologist

>>8345726

>I get the impression that psychology in the US and parts of Europe mainly means psychodyamic and and Freud stuff,

more like nowhere

who actually reads psychodynamic stuff anymore?

not that it's entirely shit - modern pdt has roughly the same efficacy rate as cbt. furthermore, while 'insight' into issues doesn't necessarily solve them, the lack of such a process in cbt might stress the client as simply ventilating issues and discussing them has a therapeutic value

hell, just the classical bit about establishing a stronger relation of trust to the therapist has an inherent value

even if cbt is obviously superior, there are lessons to be taken away from the corpse of psychodynamics

anyways, the people here seem to just meme about it because it's not as much of a hard science and because of certain issues like researchers fucking with the data being vaguely more prevalent than otherwise

it's basically a matter of whether or not you think the reliability is too poor - which i personally don't as long as a modern p-value is used rather than the old 0.05-level

you'll find some people claiming that one can't generalize jack shit though because humans are slightly different compared to two carbon atoms who behave exactly the same

>>8345016
maybe you just don't like alchemy because you think studying chemical condition is pointless because you're bad at chemical -related stuff?