Defining Psychology as a Science

Hello. My name is Dr Yeah, Bogota.

I am a lecturer at the University of Birmingham,

and today's course is going to be about psychology as

a science with a focus on the replication crisis.

So in order to introduce this particular lecture,

I'd like to talk about a particular study to give you an understanding

of exactly where we're at in terms of understanding psychology as a science.

And to do this,

I'll present a real scientific study that

has been published in an academic journal.

To do this. Let's talk about a study that received widespread media attention.

And this study took a look at 103 Australian women

who range between 20 to 70 years of age.

And they found that the most attractive quality a woman

believed to exist within men specifically if they were heterosexual,

was the quality of humour.

So the fun year you are as a man,

the more attractive you are considered by women above everything else.

Do you believe this to be true?

Do you believe that other things are more attractive like, for example,

a man having rippling pectorals or having a excellent tiktok account?

What would actually make that person more attractive in your eyes.

Do you believe that to be the case? Do you believe it to be universal?

Do you see the study and immediately question it

on its scientific merits on its useful and its methods?

What kind of things would you question this on?

So how about other studies you may have heard in our other courses in regards

to Zimbardo study where if you found that if you put people in guard roles,

they abused randomly selected prisoners, uh,

so to speak within the Stanford University?

Um, how about social influence and facilitation and inhibition,

where if you find that if you get people and you

get them to be watched by a group of other people,

they tend to perform worse on tasks.

If the task is difficult but better on task if they find

those tasks and be easy in the presence of a crowd,

even Roaches appear to show this effect.

If you follow the scientific literature,

there's the robber's cave study, which you may have heard of as well,

which basically found that if you get two groups together

and they have to compete on some form of resource,

then they tend to hate each other, and they tend to to show lots of out group hate.

Uh, Bushmen, you may have heard that video games cause aggression, not violence,

aggression.

You may have heard other studies that have recon re shown

that this effect happens over and over and over again.

No matter what you look at,

you get the same result that video games cause aggression.

So how many of these studies do you think are true?

How many of these studies do you think are, in fact,

something that definitely happens 100% of time or 90% of time, or 95% of time?

Would you give these 50% of time? Even

so, there's a question here of how scientific are these studies,

and this brings us to the idea of what it means to be scientific.

If it's a question of scientific, we need to understand what science is.

In order to get to that point,

we need to understand the parts of what makes makes a science a science,

and we need to also understand what makes psychology a science.

We can a lot of the time when people say, Oh, I did this scientific analysis.

They mean something else entirely.

So to get to a clear understanding of this,

I'd like to introduce the idea of what makes a science a science.

So in order to explore these ideas of what

makes psychology a science and the replication crisis,

we need to understand a definition of science.

And the best definition we have comes from a philosopher by the name of Carl Popper.

Popper argued

that science required a specific pattern where

theories were made based on observable phenomenon,

with a hypothesis that you would.

You basically have a prediction about what would happen.

Because, however,

Popper argued that all observations on the basis of a point of view,

you should be trying to show that any theory that

you have any hypothesis that you have is false.

You should be testing to see whether or not your thing is truly false.

So you need to do studies that can falsify a theory.

So to break that down in more useful terms for us here,

we need to define science across three separate criteria.

The first criteria is we have to have reliable, valid theory,

something that can predict something to happen in the future.

This theory should be shown to

be possibly wrong through quantifiable experimentation.

When you run this, though, this these experiments let's say, for example,

you find things that don't fit with that theory.

You should either refine that theory or make a brand new theory,

and it should feed back into a broader understanding.

Overall,

so psychology in this metric is a scientific study of human behaviour.

So we have many,

many different theories of what makes what we have in terms of human behaviour,

and the idea behind psychology should be, that is, we have a reliable,

valid theory that can predict human behaviour

that should be possibly shown to be wrong

through quantifiable experimentation.

And if we do find things that contradict our theory,

we should be able to create a new theory and or refine existing theories as we need.

However, psychology has run into a lot of problems here.

Now I'm going to summarise what I basically said here.

Overall, we need to understand is the idea of psychology as a science.

Psychology as a science means we don't understand what science is in

order to understand what science is we need to break it down.

Reliable,

valid theory that predicts theory should be

possible to falsify through quantifiable experimentation.

And when, If we do find something that is falsified,

then we should refine that theory or make a new theory.

So with that in the next lecture,

but I'd like to talk about is the specific issues that psychology has had

that basically has shown that we have a lot of problems within this domain,

and I like to break that down in our next lecture.