Psychology is a pseudoscience

[Anonymous No.9831864]

Feel free to b& because psychology isn't a science and bastardizes math.

[Anonymous No.9831865]

[Anonymous No.9832037]

>>9831864
Clinical Psychology is hardly any scientific. A lot of vague terms and explanations and posible spurious variables.

Experimental psychology/Cognitive psychology overlaps with neuroscience and it is as scientific as biology.

Social psychology is the least scientific and rigurous branch.

Freudian things/Jungian bullshit/Humanism/Positive Psychology shouldn't even be considered.

[Anonymous No.9832041]

>>9832037
Amazing arguments pal. 10/10.
Let me outline some things psychology doesnt have:
>Replicability
>Falsiability
>Competent people in the field
>Any semblance of consensus between its school of though
>Any semblance of coherence
>Men in its undergrad schools

[Anonymous No.9832044]

>>9831864
>>9832037
This anon is right, although clinical psychology is as scientific as medicine (if you count neuroscience), since they overlap tremendously (Alzheimer's and stuff, symptomless as well)

That most psychologists do their research in a retarded way says nothing about the scientific findings of psychologists that don't do their research in a retarded way

Psychology itself didn't bastardise math, instead it found incredibly useful and interesting applications for it, also enhancing much of the human mind (Siri wouldn't exist without psychological research, neither would deep brain stimulation or other cool shit)
It's just that a lot of psychologists don't know what they're doing and didn't have enough statistics and use statistics wrong as fuck

Don't hate the game, hate the fucking players intensely

[Anonymous No.9832047]

>>9832044
>Siri wouldn't exist without psychological research
Gonna need a sauce on that one buddy

[Anonymous No.9832049]

>>9832041
That no one does it, does not mean it's not possible, and also does not mean it's a pseudoscience

Most (but certainly not all, and mostly American) psychologists are retarded in math and statistics, as well as methodology
A lot are not, and make your life muuuuuuch easier
Look at red lights in submarines, that way eye-patches became obsolete in a good way, for a great deal thanks to applied cognitive psychology
As well as a lot of other applications

If you say "psychology is a pseudoscience", you certainly don't understand the entire field of psychology. A lot is fucked, but very important parts are simply based on hard math, linear algebra and computational modelling
Say goodbye to speech synthesis and artificial limbs if you don't do psychology anymore
Also no more finding out how drugs work on the human brain and no more research on transferring thoughts and computer-generated (or even brain-brain communication)

[Anonymous No.9832051]

>>9832041
Falsifiability is also not a problem in many subfields of psychology as well as replicability
Don't denounce something if you have no knowledge on the field whatsoever

I'm incredibly skeptical about most (psychological) research, but you don't know jack shit about it, and it shows

[Anonymous No.9832057]

>>9832049
>Because a few things in psychology can help us you therefore have no right to complain
>Because astrology makes people feel better about themselves you can't complain that it's bs

[Anonymous No.9832062]

>>9832047
Real easy: how does language work and how to synthesise language are questions of psycholinguistics
Both are needed to figure out how Siri works

How do you get Siri to understand humans, and how do you optimise siris response? By doing psychological testing

Better example: speech synthesis of Google. When do people actually understand the speech of google's synthesis? A typical cognitive psychological question, and vital to the success of any speech synthesis programme
Psycholinguistics is a real thing, and overlaps a shit ton with psychology

Its not for nothing that one of the leading institutes in linguistics (in the Netherlands, but also at least in Europe) is closely working together with an institute on cognitive neuroscience (making use of many psychological measures), which is the Max Planck institute in Nijmegen combined with the Donders institute in the same city

Since psychology is effectively "studying humans", and humans can be studied empirically, the science is not necessarily a pseudoscience

The methods used may sometimes be pseudoscientific, but it does not rely on fundamental assumptions that are as wrong as say, astronomy, or when psychology was a pseudoscience: in the days of Freud when it DID rely on rediculous assumptions

[Anonymous No.9832064]

>>9832062
Astrology* I am a retard

[Anonymous No.9832066]

>>9832062
That's a really cheap way to sneak psychology in but I'll give you credit for creativity

[Anonymous No.9832070]

>>9832057
You can complain parts of psychology are bs, but other parts simply are not
You can still complain about the methods, but calling it a pseudoscience is laughably uninformed

Remember that the maths (and therefore the methods) behind (historical) astrology are extremely good, well thought out and have been incredibly influential, it's just that it relied on bad assumptions, which is what made it ridiculous and untrue

Same holds for alchemy, and don't forget that Newton did most of his research on alchemy and theology, not physics

It's not the methods that necessarily make a pseudoscience, it's the assumptions

[Anonymous No.9832072]

>>9832066
It's not cheap, you might just not get what psychology is my dude (it's quite fucking broad since it is defined as encompassing all of human functioning)

[Anonymous No.9832075]

>>9832070
I'm not going to avoid calling it a pseudoscience because there are sub fields that actually care about rigor
If that upsets you (assuming you're in the field) then it's time to clean house because the majority of the field is what's giving it a bad name.

[Anonymous No.9832077]

what about religious psychology?

[Anonymous No.9832079]

>>9832077
That depends. Did you clean your penis today?

[Anonymous No.9832080]

>>9832066
>>9832072
But I'll give you one thing:
Health psychology and personality psychology (as of now) and social psychology (for a great deal) are so fundamentally ill-posed that they might as well be pseudoscience

The studying of the brain (neuroscience) sometimes is so fucking bad it is also pseudoscience, even more so than many facets of psychology, but is also certainly not pseudoscience in many studies

Cognitive psychology is teetering as fuck, depends on specific studies

But as long as it's applied and the right statistics and methods are used, fuck no it's no pseudoscience
It's just that the people studying it can't do maths and should be shot for it

[Anonymous No.9832082]

>>9832075
Probably, yeah, but you and I don't define shit and I'm stuck with assholes like you giving me an undeserved bad name, while others do deserve it
I do get it, it's not for nothing I call psychologists retards and many neuroscientists refuse to call themselves psychologists, just fuck off if you're not informed and can't form a nuanced opinion

[Anonymous No.9832088]

>>9831864
Psychology and psychoanalysis are the worst aberrations ever known to science, it has damaged medicine more than what it has ever helped. Even real psychiatrist agree that without Freud psychiatry would be at least 50 years ahead of what it is today.
Because psychoanalysis fused so much with psychiatry most respectful psychiatrists are changing the aim of the specialty to neuropsychiatry which excludes (or tries to) Freudian psychoanalysis.
There will be always a bunch of faggots that still suck Freud's dick but they are slowly dying as a branch, thankfully.

[Anonymous No.9832092]

>>9832080
>A small fraction of psychology is rigorous
I'll give you that
>Only a sith deals in absolutes
Was never trying to go at it like every single thing done under the banner of psychology is pseudoscience.
Only that the majority of what most people think of psychology is just that.

[Anonymous No.9832095]

>>9832088
Psychology is not the same as psychoanalysis you flaming faggot

Neuroscience also makes use of most tests psychologists make use of, they just put scanners on top of heads as well

You are so misinformed it scares me

[Anonymous No.9832096]

>>9832092
Are you really going to state that because the majority of people finds something a pseudoscience, it therefore is a pseudoscience?

You can go that way if you want, I however deeply distrust the majority of people on most topics

[Anonymous No.9832099]

>>9832096
I'm saying that the majority of the field is pseudoscience and as such the majority of what people know about it is

[Anonymous No.9832105]

>>9832099
>pseudoscience
so is /sci/

[Anonymous No.9832106]

>>9832095
> Psychology is not the same as psychoanalysis
I know you fucking idiot

> most tests psychologists make use of
Functional batteries are useful indeed, but they have a basis in neuroscience and not in classical psychology which would be catastrophic

Don't get so salty because you made the wrong choices in life, admit how subjective the bullcrap is and learn proper neuroscience.

[Anonymous No.9832112]

>>9832106
I'm both a neuroscientist and a psychologist my man ;) And they certainly don't have a basis in neuroscience, since most measures have a basis in behaviouralism, which explicitly did not examine the brain at all since it was deemed useless to do so
Only after fMRI and EEG arose together with computers, did neuroscience really pick up and started using those methods to learn about functionality in the brain

There's nothing catastrophic in behavioural results if well controlled, in either psychology or neuroscience
And in both they're needed to say anything about human behaviour and the brain

[Anonymous No.9832119]

>>9832099
Majority of the field is arguable, and still you can't say the assumptions of psychology are pseudoscience (anymore)
If we're talking freudian-era psychology (which is what 'most people' know about psychology), we might as well not have this discussion
Almost no-one in psychology takes Freudian thinking seriously anymore, except for a few of his lesser theories in an applied sense and some others, and if anyone does take them seriously, they are basically laughed at by the rest of the field
Or they should be, because most of Freud's ideas about the subconscious were wrong (it was good of him to coin the term though, I'll give him that)

[Anonymous No.9832120]

/sci/ only hates psychology because it heavily relies on statistics which /sci/ is generally retarded in and doesn’t understand.

[Anonymous No.9832123]

>>9832120
That's why Math should split off from Sci
That way people from here can go over to the math board and get laughed at for needing to ask questions

[Anonymous No.9832132]

>>9832112
> Only after fMRI and EEG arose...
So what Alcmaeon of Croton did c. 510 BC was bullcrap? stop lying to yourself, real neuroscience began with anatomical correlations and hystological sutudies from Santiago Ramón y Cajal, anything else was just mental masturbation.
If you really think that neuroscience began with fMRI and EEG then you are not a very good neuroscientist

[Anonymous No.9832134]

>>9832120
To be fair, most psychologists are retarded in it as well
Although all of it follows from quite simple linear algebra (and a few assumptions when neyman-pearson's approach is used, less so with permutation-based statistics which should be used way more often)

[Anonymous No.9832135]

>>9832120
All science is applied statistics, what a smokescreen. People hate psychology because it's all nested assumptions and half baked protocol.

[Anonymous No.9832140]

>>9832132
Of course I don't think that, but the field stagnated for a great while except in the beginning of the former century, which now can't be done anymore due to ethical constraints

But even Broca and Wernicke used observational techniques used in psychology today and were major influences on psychology
And don't forget Donders, who used reaction times to estimate neural processing time (something later used in both neuroscience and psychology)

To say it started a few decades ago was dumb of me, to say it doesn't share it's methods and isn't intimately intertwined with psychology is dumb of you

[Anonymous No.9832143]

>>9832112
also what the fuck is behaviouralism, I'm pretty sure you meant behaviorism which is totally different.
The branch of psychology that I do profoundly respect though is cognitive neuroscience because it is REAL NEUROSCIENCE not mental crap

[Anonymous No.9832145]

Biological study of animal behavior is identical to psychology. So, to justify their jobs, the psychologists unironically believe in human essence or some variant of it. It's no wonder that psychology killed off Behaviourism quickly as possible even though it was the most correct approach towards the study of human behaviors.

[Anonymous No.9832148]

>>9832143
At the point where we're calling cognitive neuroscience psychology we've officially made it to a semantics argument
You could just as easily call it a branch of neuroscience

[Anonymous No.9832151]

>>9832148
Because it is dah!

[Anonymous No.9832164]

>>9832143
I did mean behaviourism, English isn't my native language and I sometimes fuck terms up big time

As the cognitive neuroscientist you're arguing with, thank you for saying you respect my field :)

As that same cognitive neuroscientist: ALMOST ALL OF THE METHODS USED IN COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE ARE THE SAME AS USED IN COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
I can tell you that if these are NOT accounted for, it often makes the studies far worse and often invalid. I'd even almost go as far as to say I trust cognitive psychology more (in an applied sense) than the inferences that are made so fucking often on fMRI research. Often the reasoning in fMRI research is so incredibly poor and badly-controlled, that it says as much about the brain as a sack of dogshit.

Also: it still is 'mental crap', since we can't plug in electrodes in people's brain yet, sorry to burst your bubble, but exactly the same theories are used, often using evidence of both fields for the theory

Really, it's real hard to do science on things with ethical constraints. Both psychologists and neuroscientists would have far better methods if humans could be used like animals and MRI wasn't so damned expensive

[Anonymous No.9832191]

>>9832164
>Both psychologists and neuroscientists
why do you have to make such distinction? is it not neuroscience?
I have no problem with cognitive neuroscience as I said before, because it has it's basis in actual neuroscience (call it mental processes, or whatever) but it correlates with morphological brain studies and not in the INTERPRETATION of shit or what not, like psychology used to, just like what happened with psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Both are changed and for good. They are now actual neuroscience.

> it still is 'mental crap'...
No it is not! you are studying actual mental processes now, why it is me the one who has to tell you this stuff?

[Anonymous No.9832311]

>>9832191
Most of what cognitive neuroscience does right now is taking the theories of cognitive psychology, taking the paradigms and then looking at the neural correlates of them. If you don't do that, you get an interesting problem: what do the data of my fMRI scanner or EEG scanner even mean?
Because of that problem, often ideas from cognitive psychology are adopted, first replicated to some extent in the lab (often in pilots, because adaptations of the paradigms must be used in scanners), and then tested with a scanner on someones head.
Then, the findings are extrapolated to update the theories of cognitive psychology and then passed back to that field, who will do more behavioural research

Making a distinction between the fields is indeed a bit irrelevant, but measuring neural correlates does not make neuroscience more of a 'science' than cognitive psychology. If anything it creates even more problems (see Maris & Oostenveld, 2007 for statistical difficulties for example, or Weisberg et al., 2008 for the finding that people believe neuroscience more than psychology while it might be completely false, and lastly Roskies, 2007 for neuroscience's 'inferential distance' and Poldrack, 2006 for the use of cognitive theories in neuroscience and why this might be a bad idea sometimes)

'Studying actual mental processes' is not what you can do, without having prior theories predicting outcomes in neuroscience, since the same Popperian basis of falsification is used in most of its theories and statistics. Just having a brain light up in a scanner says absolutely nothing without the behavioural methods used in cognitive psychology, to tease out behaviours of humans

Just putting someone in a scanner isn't enough to make something more of a science.

Have fun reading these references by the way! And if you then still don't agree with me, then let us agree to disagree!

[Anonymous No.9833096]

So many posts on sci are by astroturfers paid by jews to promote the jewish notion that psycology is science.
Psycology is a religion motivated by politics, there should be a seperation of church and science.

[Anonymous No.9833126]

>>9831864
Sounds like you have an anally aggressive personality OP, try sorting yourself out before criticizing others

[Anonymous No.9833128]

>>9831864
Psychometrics is scientifically sound. I don't know if it counts as psychology.

[Anonymous No.9833191]

>>9832037
>Experimental psychology/Cognitive psychology overlaps with neuroscience and it is as scientific as biology.
It's "as scientifc" as cognitive neurosciences, ethology, and any behavioural studies. Meaning faulty protocols, controls and abysmal reproductibility rate.
Biology, and even neurosciences, aren't always as bad as psychology.