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[clamore]

I just had a really interesting participant in my study. He came in quite cheerfully and filled out the surveys, then told me that while his class only required three hours of research participation, he had taken part in six. Not to be a keener, but rather because he didn't see psychology as a legitimate science and wanted to experience our so-

Comments

[wily_fox]

Clearly a case of hysteria. Didn't you get your penis as a child?

[mykyta_p]

Meh. It is difficult to study anything besides behaviour in as rigorous a fashion, but when one doesn't attempt to, one misses a big part of the story.

Maybe less rigorous ideas on psychology can't be applied as readily, but studying the 'how' and ignoring the 'why' feels hollow to me. Human minds aren't physical particles or biological systems, where you can just observe a correlation or a cause-and-effect, and extrapolate the whole story; they are conscious, self-modelling entities, and that makes things a lot more complicated. And again, if you don't bother asking *why* people act the way they do... what's the point? Isn't that, really, the most important part?

And you shouldn't put "social" sciences in scare quotes. Firstly, because scare quotes are evil. And also, because some social sciences are quite science-ey. Sociology for example, or my darling economics.

[mykyta_p]

Also this was meant as a reply to the first post, not to the comment. >_> User malfunction.

[clamore]

Sociology is not at all sciencey, and economists themselves admit that they can't predict things reliably. They're called 'soft' sciences.

Otherwise, see Leela's comment below!

[mykyta_p]

Scare quotes are still evil!

Both sociology and economics are adequately sciency, and can make predictions, though admittedly nothing as clear cut as "if particle A hits particle B result C will occur." Economists study tons and tons of well-researched data, form hypotheses to try and explain it, test these against evidence, and do all that good sciency stuff. When an economic theory is observed not to match what actually seems to happen in the world, we toss it out and try to build new models.

I think the real problem is the subject matter. We are studying the behaviour of collectives of human beings. There is an unavoidable degree of un-predictability here, although general trends and processes can be, and are, identified. This is not a flaw in the way the science is being done, and we work as hard as we can to do the best science we can given the complexity of the subject.

[wily_fox]

Really, randomness is a euphimistic excuse for "we don't quite understand the factors of the universe". It is indeed a flaw in the science being done, but perhaps too often because we tend to ignore so many of the factors that moderate the outcomes. Economists and political theorists can ignore the impact of the individual choice, erecting more policy than genuine truism, diminishing them to philosophical speculation.

Particle A does hit B to cause C. Just because C doesn't occur in conditions D, E, and F doesn't mean it doesn't occur otherwise.

[wily_fox]

Critique of the subjectively loaded aside, the 'how', the 'what' and the 'why' aren't so mutually exclusive; why does emotion come about? Emotion is a change in metabolic activity primarily associated with the amygdala due to perceived stresses, facilitating an appropriate response. Through that, I can equally answer a question of 'how does emotion occur', just as 'what is an emotion'.
Certainly, neither of the latter questions' answers are entirely complete, and nor is the example, but it offers logical conclusions to objective evidence that includes subjective (though often an objective average) experience.
Simply because behaviouralism focuses so heavily on mechanisms of learning and reinforcement, it doesn't actively preclude questions of 'why'; it rather acknowledges that the 'why' is simply a logical cause of effect, and is of itself part-and-package of the phenomenon.