Psychology

[Durandal]

The now closed homosexual thread got me thinking about this. Do you think that psychology is a pseudoscience, or is it legitimate?

[Mr Bean]

Well I know Hypnotists at least have somthing to them, The short term suggestion thing realy works as I've watched it be done to the stuffist shirt conservative creationist who's mother was Amish to give you idea how bad this guy was, Simple test I knew would work and he would NEVER do is in his mind as soon as he was under suggest that he should say Breast, instead of Hello

Then we took him outside
Sure it was mean, but it got the personal proof I wanted(Me being for some reason totaly unhypnotisable even when I'm trying to let the guy do it, never works)

[Resident Commie]

Psychology can be divided into many areas. Some follow pseudoscientific practices. Others are legitimate practices, for example bio psyc that studies areas of the brain and how they work, and their purpose.

[Nick]

Psychology can be divided into many areas. Some follow pseudoscientific practices. Others are legitimate practices, for example bio psyc that studies areas of the brain and how they work, and their purpose.

I'd have to agree - psuedoscience is a question of how investigations are conducted (or, more to the point, not conducted), rather than a question of field of study.

Psychology is somewhat hampered by the fact that the ideal conditions of an experiment with a single uncontrolled variable are rarely possible. The consequence of that is that it is hard to get the hard and fast rules one finds in physics and chemistry and so forth.

Rather, it is a matter of finding trends and tendencies, predispositions, etc, trying to get a handle on what is common to many or all humans and/or other animals. Are there cranks out there? Sure - but most research psychologists are genuine scientists, who are reluctant to venture opinions without hard data, and clearly tag speculative hypothoses as speculation. The complex nature of the field, and the difficulty of getting and interpreting data often means the answers aren't as clearcut as we might hope.

If you are specifically talking about Freudian psychology and/or psychotherapy - Freud was a crank who managed to make some reasonable sounding guesses, but got cause and effect in a hopelessly tangled mess. Unsurprisingly, psychotherapists are not big on publishing scientific papers providing reliable evidence to back up their practices - they rely almost exclusively on anecdotal evidence.