In a provocative new paper, Norwegian psychologist Jan Smedslund argues that psychology “cannot be an empirical science”. Smedslund is a veteran of the field; his first paper was published in 1953.
He opens by saying that
Psychology is a science in crisis, both with respect to theoretical coherence and practical efficiency.
This, he says, is not a problem that could be remedied by further development of psychological theory. Rather, the point is that the whole enterprise is inherently limited:
A well-known adage [was] quoted to me by my teacher David Krech: “What is new in psychology is not good, and what is good is not new”… I am inclined to think that the task of psychology must necessarily be limited to explication and analysis of what is already implicitly familiar.
…As I see it, psychology takes its departure in, and consists of reflections about and analyses of, persons in terms of ordinary language. Whether or not this can result in a ‘science’ is the topic of the present article.
In other words, while natural sciences like chemistry and biology can discover new truths, psychology can, at best, offer us new ways of looking at old truths.
Why does Smedslund believe this? He outlines four issues that “make it difficult to develop an empirical science in the classical sense, e.g., formulating and testing general hypotheses.”
Let’s take the first issue, ‘irreversibility’, which offers a good flavor of Smedslund’s case.
A basic feature of psychological processes is their irreversibility. Every experience changes a person in a way that cannot be completely undone… one must assume that persons are continuously and irreversibly changing.
Why is this a problem for psychology? Because
If we assume that psychological processes are irreversible, it follows that all apparent constancy in psychological phenomena is conditional on stability of outcome and will disappear if and when the outcome is changed.
This conditional nature of stability means that psychological research cannot be a search for ever-lasting invariance (laws), but only for more or less local and temporary regularity.
Hence, psychological findings are in principle historical, and different from findings in the natural sciences that often involve genuine invariants, and are in principle reversible.
Smedslund says that even rigorous experimental methods, e.g. the randomized controlled trial (RCT) procedure, don’t solve this problem. At best, they allow us to make valid statements about one particular group of experimental volunteers at one particular time.
The logic of inductive inference entails that what is observed under given conditions at one time will occur again under the same conditions at a later time. But this logic can only be applied when it is possible to replicate the same initial conditions, and this is strictly impossible in the case of irreversible processes.
As a result, no psychological theory can attain the status of a “law”, and no result will be perfectly replicable.
As time goes by, the likelihood of successful replication of psychological findings can be expected to diminish because, due to irreversible historical change, it gets more difficult to approximate the original external conditions.
In which case, what’s the point?
The assumption that one is “accumulating” knowledge becomes doubtful, and the rationale for assembling data is weakened.
But isn’t this all a philosophical, ‘hand-waving’ dismissal? Maybe it’s true that psychology can’t determine perfectly universal laws, but isn’t it a matter of fact that some psychological theories are highly predictive and thus useful?
I expect many counter-examples from defenders of the current paradigm to be centered on the notion of probability, and on the argument that research findings can demonstrably provide the practitioner with slightly better odds than without them. Formally this is true. One frequently refers to the parallel to medical practice which can be improved by research…
But… medical practice involves single factors accounting for a considerable part of the total variance, whereas psychological practice rarely involves single factors explaining more than a few per cent. In psychology, there is an unbridgeable gap between odds at the group level and odds for specific individuals.
Smedslund’s reference to “practitioners” here makes it clear that his main concern is clinical psychology. However, his argument equally well applies to most of ‘basic’ research psychology, I think.
There are some obvious counter-examples though. For instance, Smedslund says that there are no “laws” in psychology, but a few have been reported, including the Weber-Fechner Law, familiar to all undergraduate psychology students, and Ricco’s Law. However, Smedslund might respond that these are not psychological laws, because they don’t relate to either thought or behavior. They are, he might say, psychophysical laws about how our sensory organs work.
My view is that the question of whether psychology is ‘a science’ is something of a red herring. Certainly, I agree with Smedslund that psychology has little in common with physics, but physics does not set the standards of ‘science’; most of biology has little in common with physics either.
For that matter, history isn’t physics, but nor is it nonsense. History consists of a body of facts and theories; it’s not “science” but that doesn’t make it any less true. Psychology is somewhere between history than physics, probably closer to history in my view, but this is no bad thing.
Smedslund, J. (2015). Why Psychology Cannot be an Empirical Science Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science DOI: 10.1007/s12124-015-9339-x
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In terms of laws related to behavior, would Smedslund consider the law of effect a psychological law?
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Lee Smolin does not approve
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Psychology – like economics, politics, social justice, Federalized education, quantized gravitation, and religion – is anything you want it to be except empirically predictive: Potemkin village intellectualism.
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Let’s use just one 2015 review for counterfactual information, “Early life trauma, depression and the glucocorticoid receptor gene–an epigenetic perspective” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282048312_Early_life_trauma_depression_and_the_glucocorticoid_receptor_gene_-_an_epigenetic_perspective
In there we find:
1. “Environmental effects specific to the individual (63%), whilst genetic effects accounted for 37%. Subsequent studies have produced similar results.” and
2. “Epigenetic changes are potentially reversible and therefore amenable to intervention, as has been seen in cancer, cardiovascular disease and neurological disorders.”
Smedslund’s blindness to item 1 gave rise to assertions that ignore the information and promise of item 2. Maybe that would be acceptable for arguments three decades ago before epigenetics was widely studied, but in 2015?-
Behavior is the most complex trait influenced by multiple genes and environment hard to determine/identify!
An interesting article on the subject: The emergence of genomic psychology http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3327528/
“Insights from genomic analyses might allow psychologists to understand, predict and modify human behaviour”
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For an indepth look at Quantum Psychology, follow the links provided. Let me start by saying this,every psychological experiment ever conducted, was conducted through a controlled environment. Thus, every psychological experiment, is bias, as, evolution is, a perpetual state of natural selection in an uncontrolled environment, adapt and survive, or die trying. Let me close my comment with this: What does Tyranny, Slavery, Servitude, Oppression and Obedience all have in common? Authority. What does every psychological disorder on earth have in common? None of the people suffering from them, are an authority.
http://thebrainnosidekick.blogspot.com/2015/11/wait-until-you-see-it-truth-is-singular.html
http://thelightofspeed.blogspot.com/2015/12/psycho-social-engineering-act-of.html
http://thelightofspeed.blogspot.com/2015/12/it-would-appear-that-powers-that-be-are.html
Derek R Speed
Psychology
Mount Saint Vincent university
under Dr Stephen Perrott
(a former police officer)
Carleton University
Under Dr D McIntyre.
Basic Psychology, Social Psychology, Developmental Psychology. Careful Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas anymore.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/104488710163810978538
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I think he makes an interesting point about how the results of psychology have to be stated in ordinary folk language, whose terms developed in an era of profound scientific naivete. It shouldn’t be surprising that we can’t whip up properly general scientific theories out of those folk terms. If there is going to be great progress in psychology, it will come from neurology, which isn’t constrained in the same way.
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This argument is incomprehensible. It confounds personality, psychological processes and psychological phenomena as if the three constructs are one and the same. As far as I understood it the argument is
1) Every experience changes the person irreversibly
2) Therefore, all regularities we can describe about behavior cannot be universal but dependent on the set of experiences that led to it. Changes in experiences would lead to different outcomes and different patterns, so there can be no law discovery and no empirical psychology.First, this uses such ambiguous language that it is very difficult to understand what exactly the author means. What changes irreversibly? At some places he speaks about “persons”, then about “processes” and finally about “phenomena”, but the three are definitely not the same thing. It is trivial that experiences are remembered and thus have changed the memory state of the system, but how exactly does it follow from this that the processes which operate in the system are themselves irreversibly affected by changes in the content?
And even if they were, then this change should follow some rules which could be discovered by empirical means and then a worthy goal of psychology would be to discover those rules and principles that govern how experiences affect changes in the processes. How is that different from chemistry, where exposure to different temperatures leads to fundamental changes in the chemical properties of elements, and the task of chemistry is to describe how those changes occur and what they are?
Further, his point in the paper depends heavily on a criticism of within-subject designs where exposure to one condition prevents people from naivly participating in another condition. He goes on to say that the only solution psychology has used are randomized and matched between-subject design, but which for some reason he argues we can’t use to generalize outside of the specific group samples, because of “individual differences”. That has two major problems – random sampling, if done correctly, and with big enough groups, guarantees that in the long run results would be generalizable to the larger population from which the samples are drawn. This is a statistical fact. Furthermore, his criticism of within-subject design is valid for some, but definitely not for all within-subject studies. The majority of cognitive studies depend on within-subject design without having to face that problem because they study phenomena for which it doesn’t matter which condition comes first. And even when it does, we have counter-balancing and other methods we can use to minimize the effects. His argument is more problematic for social and personality psychology studies, but there people can use between-subject designs, since his criticism of them is not sound.
Empirical psychology has many challenges and problems, but this is a pseudo problem.
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Within a good range of changes we already have calculable estimates from the Rescorla-Wagner model.
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I agree with Ven Popov; pseudo problem. Or, universally confounding problem if all science, as we are continuously discovering as we look forget down the rabbit hole, so to speak, that what we thought was proven reality is anything but. Just depends on how you wanna look at it