Download is psyc a science ppt

Debates in psychology
• Is psychology a science?
What you need to know:
• Describe the debate over what science is,
including how far psychology fits the
definition
• Evaluate whether psychology should be called
a science, including where ethnocentrism and
cultural relativity fit.
Psychology and scientific subject
matter
• Consider the following questions
• Are the subjects of psychology scientific?
• Are the methods scientific?
Term
explanation
example
Hypothesis writing
Drawing an idea from
something and making a
statement about what is
then expected from it
Noticing lots of white
swans ,hypothesis: all
swans are white
Empirical testing
Testing the idea against
reality
Looking at lots of swans
and checking that they are
white
falsification
Trying to prove a
hypothesis is false
You can only prove that
they are not all white not
that they are all white
reductionism
Reducing complex issues to The actions of a drug are
small parts
focused on a small part of
the brain
controls
Reducing bias by
controlling variables
Biases include
experimenter effects,
situational and participant
variables and wider issues
eg ethnocentrism.
Think Obese Fat Rat
To be scientific
• Research needs to be
• Objective
• Falsifiable
• Replicable
Psychology and science
• Falsifiability – inferential stats indicate the
extent to which our results are due to chance
and not a real difference/relationship
• Paradigms -there should be a single paradigm
if psychology is truly a science. Psychology has
a number of different paradigms so is thought
to be pre science.
• Discourses -lab situations don’t go very far in
understanding discourse
Maybe there are reasons for not ‘doing
science’
• Holism – the whole is more than the sum of
the parts, maybe we should break everything
done to its constituent parts!
• Humanism – we are more than just specimins
• Although scientific method is reliable it is not
always valid
• Social constructionism – we should study
constructs which will tell us more about real
life.
How scientific are the 5 as
approaches?
•
•
•
•
•
The social approach
The cognitive approach
The psychodynamic approach
The biological approach
The learning approach
examzone
1. With reference to one approach in psychology
describe ways in which it is scientific
1. Explain why you think psychology is not scientific.
You have 45 minutes in the LRC to produce a
PowerPoint presentation answering these 2
questions. You will present this in the next session.
Please also produce a handout for the other members
of the class to fill in as they listen to your
presentation.