Many of you may be
old enough to remember George A. Miller’s book “Psychology: The Science of
Mental Life”. As an undergraduate psychology student I was brought up with
books with titles that variously contained the words science, psychology, behaviour
and mind in them. These books had one main purpose – to persuade students of
psychology that psychology was a legitimate scientific pursuit, using rigorous
scientific methods to understand human behaviour and the human mind. All on a
par with the more established sciences such as biology, physics and chemistry.
Even if you’re
happy with the notion of psychology as a science, we then have the various debates
about whether psychology is a biological science or a social science, and in
the UK this isn’t just an issue about terminology, it is also a major issue
about funding levels. Do psychologists need labs, do undergraduate psychology
students need to do lab classes to learn to be psychologists? This almost
became the tail wagging the dog, as funding bodies such as HEFCE (and its
predecessor the University Funding Council) looked to save money by re-banding
psychology as a half-breed science sitting somewhere between social science and
biological science. I even seem to recall that some psychology departments were
designated social psychology departments and given little or no lab funding. So
were students in those Departments being taught science or not? What breed of
psychology was it?
Just one more
example before I get to the main point. A few years ago I had the good fortune
to teach a small-group elective to second-year medical students. This was a
6-week course on cognitive models of psychopathology. I was fortunate to teach
this group because it contained highly motivated and intelligent students. Now,
I have never viewed myself as anything other than a scientist using scientific
methods to understand human behaviour in general and psychopathology in
particular. But these groups of highly able and highly trained medical students
inevitably had difficulty with two particular aspects of the material I was
teaching them: (1) how can we use science to study “cognitions” when we can’t
see them, when we make up ‘arbitrary’ concepts to describe them, and we can’t
physically dissect them? and (2) at the end of the day, cognitions will always
boil down to biology, so it is biology – and not cognitions – that should be
the object of scientific study.
What struck me
most was that these students had already developed a conception of science that
was not procedure based, but was content based. It was the subject matter that
defined science for them, not particularly the methodology.
My argument here
is that while psychology had been touted as a science now for a number of
generations, psychologists over these generations have failed to convince
significant others (scientists in other disciplines, funding organizations,
etc.) that psychology is a science on a par with other established sciences.
Challenges to psychology as a science come in many forms and from many
different sources. Here are a few examples:
(1) Funding bodies frequently attempt their
own ‘redefining’ of psychology, especially when budgets are tight, and
psychology is a soft target here, with its large numbers of students offering
significant savings if science-related funding is downgraded.
(2) Students, teachers and researchers in
other science disciplines often have very esoteric views of what science is,
and these views revolve around their own subject matter and the techniques they
specially use to understand that subject matter. Psychologists have probably
not been proactive or aggressive enough in broadcasting the ways in which
psychology is science and how it uses scientific methodologies in a highly
objective and rigorous way.
(3) Members of other science disciplines
frequently have a ‘mental block’ when it comes to categorizing psychology as a
science (that’s probably the nicest way I can put it!). This reminds me of the
time a few years ago when I was representing psychology on the UK Science Council. There was a long
discussion about how to increase the number of women taking science degrees. During
this discussion it was pointed out that psychology was extremely successful at
recruiting female students, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too pessimistic about
recruiting women into at least some branches of science. The discussion paused
briefly, and then continued as if nothing of any relevance whatsoever had been said!
(4) All branches of knowledge are open to
allegations of fraud, and there has been some considerable discussion recently
about fraud
in science, fraud
in psychology and the social sciences, and – most specifically – fraud
in social psychology. Arguably, psychology is the science discipline most
likely to be hurt by such allegations – not because methodology is necessarily
less rigorous than in other science disciplines or publication standards any
less high, but because many scientists in other disciplines fail to understand
how psychology practices as a science. Sadly, this is even true within the
discipline of psychology, and it is easy to take the trials and tribulations
that have recently been experienced in social psychology research as an
opportunity for the more ‘hard-nosed’ end of psychology to sneer at what might
be considered the softer under-belly of psychological science. One branch of
psychology ‘sneering’ at another branch is not a clever thing to do, because
this will all be grist to the mill branding psychology generally as
“non-scientific” by members of other science disciplines.
I’ll finish by
mentioning a recent
report published in 2011 attempting to benchmark UK psychology research
within an international context. Interestingly, this report (published jointly
by the ESRC, BPS, EPS and AHPD) listed nine challenges to the competitiveness of
current psychology research in the UK. A significant majority of these
challenges relate to the skills and facilities necessary for pursuing
psychology as a science!
Psychology still
requires an orchestrated campaign to establish it’s scientific credentials –
especially in the eyes of other science disciplines, many of which have their
own distorted view of what science is, but already occupy the intellectual high ground. Challenges to psychology as a science
come from many diverse sources, including funding bodies, other sciences, intra-disciplinary
research fraud, and conceptual differences within psychology as an integrated,
but diverse, discipline.
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