Introduction | What is science? | What is psychology?
Present-day human psychology | Conclusion | Further Reading
The field of human psychology is a powerful force in modern society, and its influence is widespread – in language, law, the social contract, and in our perception of ourselves. Because legal decisions are sometimes made based on psychology, decisions that might cause someone to be incarcerated or freed, decisions that might shape public policy, it is important to establish whether psychology is a science or a simple belief system. We should determine whether psychology can be relied on to objectively support the social and legal policies that are based on it. This determination is important because psychology has great influence – it is regularly called on to provide decisions and judgments about behavior, public policy, and law.
In modern times, such a serious public burden can only be borne by a field that is based on reason, on science. Which leads to our question: is human psychology in fact based on science?
In order to consider whether psychology is a science, we must first define our terms. It is not overarching to say that science is what separates human beings from animals , and, as time goes by and we learn more about our animal neighbors here on Earth, it becomes increasingly clear that science is all that separates humans from animals. We are learning that animals have feelings, passions, and certain rights. What animals do not have is the ability to reason, to rise above feeling.
Some will argue that it is religion, not science, that separates us from the animal world, but that is obviously not correct. To the contrary, religion is the part of human behavior that most closely ties us to the animal world. A religious believer has his god in the same way that a dog has his master, and either will do absolutely anything for his master, often arriving directly at action without first making a detour at reason. If you find this statement incredible, simply review the events of September 11 th , 2001 again, a day during which some Islamic True Believers proved the sincerity of their religious beliefs and redefined “incredible” for all of us. This may seem to be a digression, but there is a connection between religion and psychology we'll be discussing later.
Science's goal is to create reasonable explanations (theories) to describe reality – theories that rely, not on feelings or passions, but on evidence. Science defines “evidence” in a special way that will seem rather strict to someone only familiar with the legal definition. To science, evidence is gathered and evaluated (and sometimes discarded) according to some rigid rules, rules meant to assure that a scientific theory reflects reality to the best of our ability.
How strict are science's rules of evidence? Well, let's first compare science to law. The legal definition of evidence is (as one example) a set of observations that appear to associate a particular person with a particular event. Typically, legal proceedings begin with an investigation meant to collect evidence, followed by a trial that establishes whether that evidence meets a criterion – “beyond a reasonable doubt” in criminal proceedings, and “according to the preponderance of evidence” in civil proceedings (in the US). This, by the way, is why O. J. Simpson was found innocent in criminal court, but found guilty in a subsequent civil proceeding – using the same evidence, he wasn't guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but he was guilty “according to the preponderance of evidence.”
In an embarrassing and tragic number of cases, innocent people have been placed on death row (and sometimes executed) based on evidence that, notwithstanding the innocence of the convict, met the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, when evaluated by a jury of 12 upstanding citizens, people whom we shall charitably assume paid no mind to the color of the defendant's skin. Relatively recently, new ways of gathering evidence – like DNA testing – have proven the innocence of a fortunate few death-row inmates, and others who might have gone unpunished have been arrested.
The point here is that legal evidence is not remotely scientific evidence. Contrary to popular belief, science doesn't use sloppy evidentiary standards like “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and scientific theories never become facts. This is why the oft-heard expression “proven scientific fact” is never appropriate – it only reflects the scientific ignorance of the speaker . Scientific theories are always theories, they never become the final and only explanation for a given phenomenon.
As to the ever-popular expression “scientific law,” this is often an earnest effort by scientists to bridge the gap between the level of certainty required in science and that accepted in ordinary life. In fact and strictly speaking, there are no scientific laws, only theories about which we are very certain, like entropy and gravity, which, if they were to be tersely expressed in everyday language, would read: “Eventually it will break, and when it does, it is going to fall.”
About scientific evidence, philosopher Karl Popper said, “No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.” This saying aptly summarizes the difference between scientific evidence and every other kind of evidence, and it dramatizes the difference between science and ordinary human thinking.
This very strict evidentiary standard is essential for science to provide its riches, and it is no problem for people who have been properly educated. But in the lives of people for whom “evidence” means “he said, she said,” certain problems are inevitable.
When properly conducted, scientific investigations never draw conclusions directly from observations. This may sound unnecessarily strict, but it is necessary for science to accomplish what it does. To demonstrate this, here is a hypothetical conversation between a psychic wannabe (PW) and a scientist (S):
PW: “I successfully predicted 100 coin tosses, therefore I am psychic.”
S: “How many total coin tosses were there?”
PW: “200”.
S: “So you guessed half correctly, and half incorrectly, yes?”
PW: “Yes – isn't that amazing?”
S: “No, not really. It is the outcome predicted by chance.”
(a day goes by ...)
PW: “I correctly guessed eight coin tosses in a row! Now that's proof that I'm psychic!”
S: “How many total coin tosses this time?”
PW: “Umm, 256.”
S: “With that many coin tosses, eight sequential correct guesses has a probability of ½ of coming about by chance. You might be psychic, but there is a much more likely explanation – chance.”
This imaginary conversation highlights a cardinal rule of science: Always consider alternative explanations, never accept anything at face value.
In everyday life, people are regularly taken in by con men who rely on public ignorance of reason and science. Here's an example – you receive a mailing from someone who wants to be your financial advisor. He predicts that the stock market will fall (or rise) during the next month. At the end of the month, his prediction turns out to be correct. Then , for six months straight , he mails you a prediction, and each prediction turns out to be correct. In a quick calculation you realize you would have made several million dollars by following his advice.
Having “proven” his abilities, the financial advisor now wants you to give him control of your portfolio. His is the best performance you have ever seen, he obviously has special skills, what do you do? Well, hopefully you follow the cardinal rule: Always consider alternative explanations.
Here is a very likely alternative explanation – the “financial wizard” is a con man, a hustler. Here is how this well-known con works:
|
These 256 marks (the con-man term for someone about to be “serviced”) must either consider alternative explanations, or they stand to lose a lot of money. And very important: for those who decide to accept the con man's services, their decision is perfectly reasonable when based on everyday perceptions. Just like many of the claims of the practitioners of human psychology, and to someone unable to think critically, it is perfectly reasonable, and it is wrong.
Apart from being filtered through all possible explanations, scientific theories have another important property – they must make predictions that can be tested and possibly falsified. In fact, and this may surprise you, scientific theories can only be falsified, they can never be proven true once and for all. That is why they are called “theories,” as certain as some of them are – it is always possible they may be replaced by better theories, ones that explain more, or are simpler, or that make more accurate predictions than their forebears.
It's very simple, really. If a theory doesn't make testable predictions, or if the tests are not practical, or if the tests cannot lead to a clear outcome that supports or falsifies the theory, the theory is not scientific. This may come as another surprise, but very little of the theoretical content of human psychology meets this scientific criterion. As to the clinical practice of psychology, even less meets any reasonable definition of “scientific.”
Psychology has as its aim the understanding of human behavior, and as a secondary goal, the treatment of behaviors deemed abnormal. Almost immediately upon the formation of the field, efforts were made to place psychological studies on a scientific basis. Early psychological studies were conducted by William Wundt at the University of Leipzig, Germany. One of his students, G. Stanley Hall, then went on to establish the first American psychological laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.
Then, in 1900, Sigmund Freud introduced psychoanalytical theory in his book “The Interpretation of Dreams.” This was the first ultimately large-scale effort to apply psychological knowledge to the problem of treatment or therapy.
Human psychology and the related fields of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy achieved their greatest acceptance and popularity in the 1950s, at which time they were publicly perceived as sciences. But this was never true, and it is not true today – human psychology has never risen to the status of a science, for several reasons:
Ethical considerations.
If you want to study the behavior of rats or pigeons, there are no significant ethical limitations – you can kill them, you can cut them up, you can dress them out in EEG probes while they play violent video games, no one will complain. They are expendable, they are animals.
But as to the study of human beings, there are severe limitations on what kinds of studies are permitted. As an example, if you want to know whether removing specific brain tissue results in specific behavioral changes, you cannot perform the study on humans. You have to perform it on animals and try to extrapolate the result to humans.
One of the common work-arounds to this ethical problem is to perform what are called “retrospective studies,” studies that try to draw conclusions from past events rather than setting up a formal laboratory experiment with strict experimental protocols and a control group. If you simply gather information about people who have had a certain kind of past experience, you are freed from the ethical constraint that prevents you from exposing experimental subjects to that experience in the present.
But, because of intrinsic problems, retrospective studies produce very poor evidence and science. For example, a hypothetical retrospective study meant to discover whether vitamin X makes people more intelligent may only “discover” that the people who took the vitamin were those intelligent enough to take it in the first place. In general, retrospective studies cannot reliably distinguish between causes and effects, and any conclusions drawn from them are suspect.
Think about this for a moment. In order for human psychology to be placed on a scientific footing, it would have to conduct strictly controlled experiments on humans, in some cases denying treatments or nutritional elements deemed essential to health (in order to have a control group), and the researchers would not be able to tell the subjects whether or not they were receiving proper care (in order not to bias the result). This is obviously unethical behavior, and it is a key reason why human psychology is not a science (there are others).
Blurring of research, diagnosis and therapy.
This blurring is a problem in mainstream medicine as well as psychology, but it has a more severe form in psychology and psychiatry. It is more severe mostly because of the above ethical limitations, which preclude formal, strict scientific study on human subjects.
As a result, ordinary clinical therapeutic treatments are actually (potentially) a mixture of the three items listed above – research, diagnosis and therapy . If the treatment is routine and uneventful, it is clinical therapy, which most people realize is entirely ineffectual in any case (i.e. with an outcome indistinguishable from speaking to a layperson in, say, a bar). If the client shows traits useful for diagnosis, the treatment ipso facto becomes diagnostic. If the interplay between the clinician and the client produces a novel, seemingly useful cause-effect relationship, the treatment becomes research. This clinical opportunism is another reason psychology has the reputation it does – very little distinction exists between gathering knowledge, and dispensing knowledge.
This raises another ethical issue, that of informed consent – has the client been properly informed as to the nature of the procedures? But this is only apparently an ethical issue, because the clinician can't tell the client what is going to happen, and he is certainly not going to resist publishing any interesting, unforeseeable results as research findings. In short, informed consent is not possible, because the clinician honestly doesn't know what is going to happen -- no one does.
Overall lax standards.
The items listed above inevitably create an atmosphere in which absolutely anything goes (at least temporarily), judgments about efficacy are utterly subjective, and as a result, the field of psychology perpetually splinters into cults and fads (examples below). “Studies” are regularly published that would never pass muster with a self-respecting peer review committee from some less soft branch of science.
If society correctly evaluated human psychology as a loose grouping of subjective cults and fads, the above summary would not pose any kind of social problem. But in fact there are people who still think human psychology is based in science, all evidence to the contrary. The sad result is that society's engine of legal and social authority is sometimes steered by psychology, at times with unjust and terrible consequences. Here is a brief list of historical examples in which psychology's bogus status as a science has produced harm (it is by no means a comprehensive list):
During World War I, psychologist R. M. Yerkes oversaw the testing of 1.7 million US Army draftees. His questionable conclusions were to have far-reaching consequences, leading to a 1924 law placing severe limitations on the immigration of those groups Yerkes and his followers believed to be mentally unfit – Jews and Eastern Europeans in particular. Yerkes later thoroughly recanted his methods and findings in an 800-page confession/tome that few bothered to read, and the policies he set in motion had the dreadful side effect of preventing the immigration of Jews trying to escape the predations of Hitler and his henchmen later on.
The original test results happened to dovetail with Yerkes' explicit eugenic beliefs, a fact lost on nearly everyone at the time.
In an effort to answer the question of whether intelligence is primarily governed by environment or genes, psychologist Sir Cyril Burt (1883-1971) performed a long-term study of twins that was later shown to be most likely a case of conscious or unconscious scientific fraud. His work, which purported to show that IQ is largely inherited, was used as a “scientific” basis by various racists and others, and, despite having been discredited, still is.
These are just two figures in a long list of people who have tried to use psychology to give a scientific patina to their personal beliefs, perhaps beginning with Francis Galton (1822-1911), the founder and namer of eugenics, one who tried (and failed) to design psychological tests meant to prove his beliefs. This practice of using psychology as a personal soapbox continues to the present, in fact, it seems to have become more popular.
What these accounts have in common is that no one was able to (or was willing to) use scientific standards of evidence to refute the claims at the time of their appearance, because psychology is only apparently a science. Only through enormous efforts and patience, including sometimes repeating an entire study using the original materials (as in Steven Jay Gould replicating Morton's flawed craniometry work), can a rare, specific psychological claim be refuted. Such exceptions aside, there is ordinarily no recourse to the “testable, falsifiable claims” criterion that sets science apart from ordinary human behavior.
One might think that psychology might have learned from its past errors and evolved into a more strict and scientific enterprise. In fact the reverse seems to be the case. Here are two contemporary examples:
Facilitated Communication
This bogus field sprang into existence, fueled by the wish that specific disabled (autistic, severely retarded) people might be able to communicate with their loved ones after all. It purports to allow communication with a disabled person through the agency of a facilitator, someone who typically holds a writing implement (or operates a keyboard) simultaneously with the disabled person, and the two together create a written account of the disabled person's otherwise inaccessible experiences. Frequently, the “communication” seems to reveal that the disabled person is being abused horribly by parents or caretakers. This in turn has resulted in bogus legal actions, spurred by prosecutors who think psychology is a science.
Was this set of beliefs tested and shown to be flawed in a scientific study? No. Was it called into question because of the utterly fantastic content of the “communications”? No again. How then was the fraud uncovered? Well, the PBS television program “Frontline” showed up and taped some typical clinical practice, revealing some aspects of the practice anyone not brain-damaged should have been able to notice, such as the fact that the disabled person was often looking at the ceiling while supposedly cooperating in keyboard communication, a behavior that requires one to look at the keyboard at least occasionally. The facilitator, of course, was looking intently at the keyboard.
And finally, after evidence of the bogus nature of both the practice and the communications was demonstrated, was the field abandoned? Of course not – it is still widely practiced, with the difference that TV cameras are now typically excluded from the clinics.
Repressed Memory Therapy
In this variation on the above bogus practice, talk-therapy clients are guided to “recovering” repressed memories, typically of horrible childhood abuse, sexual and otherwise. And, like the above practice, these “recovered memories” sometimes cause people to be jailed for vivid, if imaginary, crimes.
In this case, unlike the above, over time the frequency and implausibility of the actionable claims ruined everything for the eager practitioners, and some clients later decided they were talked into the “memories” by the practitioner. The usual number of lawsuits has resulted.
But, just as in the case of “facilitated communication,” science played no role in either the creation or destruction of this aberration, this fad. Science played no part in the creation of either field, although properly designed experiments could have been used at the outset to prove that “facilitated communication” was not remotely what its advocates claimed. And science had little role to play in the later debunking, because psychology is only coincidentally addressed by science.
Some may object that the revolution produced by psychoactive drugs has finally placed psychology on a firm scientific footing, but the application of these drugs is not psychology, it is pharmacology . The efficacy of drugs in treating conditions once thought to be psychological in origin simply presents another example where psychology got it wrong, and the error could not be uncovered using only psychology's methods.
One might think the dismal history of psychology and the recent revolution in psychoactive drugs might cause more than a few psychologists to wonder whether their field means anything at all. But the absence of a scientific foundation for psychology means that, like religion, it can prevail in the face of overwhelming evidence that it has no fixed, testable content.
This seems an appropriate time (and context) to comment on psychology's “bible”: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and its companion, the International Classifications of Diseases, Mental Disorders Section (hereafter jointly referred to as DSM). Now in its fourth edition, this volume is very revealing because of its significance to the practice of psychology and psychiatry and because of what it claims are valid mental illnesses.
Over the history of the DSM, and as a result of valiant efforts, the DSM has come to define more and more conditions as evidence of “mental illness.” As an example, in the current edition, the following conditions are defined as mental illnesses:
|
Putting aside for the moment the nebulous “phase of life problem,” excuse me? – “Sibling rivalry” is now a mental illness? Yes, according to the current DSM/ICD. And few are as strict about spelling as I am, but even I am not ready to brand as mentally ill those who (frequently) cannot accurately choose from among “site,” “cite” and “sight” when they write to comment on my Web pages. As to “mathematics disorder” being a mental illness, sorry, that just doesn't add up.
The content of this influential volume, a cornerstone of the practice of contemporary psychiatry, has become so ridiculous that professional psychologists have begun openly deriding it. Professors Herb Kutchins of California State University and Stuart A. Kirk of the University of New York found “...there is ample reason to conclude that the latest versions of DSM as a clinical tool are unreliable and therefore of questionable validity as a classification system.”
Psychiatrist Matthew Dumont wrote this about DSM ’s pretensions to scientific authority: “The humility and the arrogance in the prose are almost indistinguishable, frolicking like puppies at play. They say: ‘...while this manual provides a classification of mental disorder...no definition adequately specifies precise boundaries for the concept...’ [APA, 1987]...They go on to say: ’...there is no assumption that each mental disorder is a discrete entity with sharp boundaries between it and other mental disorders or between it and no mental disorder’ [APA, 1987].” It goes without saying that these buried qualifiers do nothing to reduce the apparent authority of this volume among its advocates.
Is the DSM becoming more or less reasonable as time passes? Decide for yourself. Here is a list of years and the number of conditions identified as “mental illnesses” in the DSM for that year:
| Year | Number of conditions |
| 1952 | 112 |
| 1968 | 163 |
| 1980 | 224 |
| 1987 | 253 |
| 1994 | 374 |
Based on this table and extrapolating into the future using appropriate regression methods, in 100 years there will be more than 3600 conditions meriting treatment as mental illnesses. To put it another way, there will be more mental states identified as abnormal than there are known, distinct mental states. In short, no behavior will be normal.
At this point it must be clear to the intelligent reader that psychology can make these wild claims, offer these questionable therapies, only because there is no practical likelihood of refutation – no clear criteria to invalidate a claim. This, in turn, is because human psychology is not a science, it is a belief system similar to religion.
And, like religion, human psychology has a dark secret at its core – it contains within it a model for correct behavior, although that model is never directly acknowledged. Buried within psychology is a nebulous concept that, if it were to be addressed at all, would be called “normal behavior.” But do try to avoid inquiring directly into this normal behavior among psychologists – nothing is so certain to get you diagnosed as having an obsessive disorder.
In the same way that everyone is a sinner in religion's metaphysical playground, everyone is mentally ill in psychology's long, dark hallway – no one is truly “normal.” This means everyone needs psychological treatment. This means psychologists and psychiatrists are guaranteed lifetime employment, although that must surely be a coincidence rather than a dark motive.
But this avoids a more basic problem with the concept of “normal behavior.” The problem with establishing such a standard, whether one does this directly as religion does, or indirectly as psychology does, is that the activity confronts, and attempts to contradict, something that really is a scientific theory – evolution. In evolution, through the mechanism of natural selection, organisms adapt to the conditions of their environment, and, because the environment keeps changing, there is no particular genotype that can remain viable in the long term.
The scientific evidence for evolution is very strong, and evolution's message is that only flexible and adaptable organisms survive in a world of constant change. Reduced to everyday, individual terms, it means no single behavioral pattern can for all time be branded “correct” or “normal.” This is the core reason religion fails to provide for real human needs (which wasn't its original purpose anyway), and this failing is shared by psychology – they both put forth a fixed behavioral model in a constantly changing world.
The present atmosphere among many psychologists and psychiatrists can only be described as panic. This panic is clearly shown in the rapid, seemingly purposeful destruction of the DSM, the field's “bible,” as a legitimate diagnostic tool (because if everything is a mental illness, then nothing is). This panic arises in part from a slow realization that many conditions formerly thought to be mental conditions amenable to psychological treatment, turn out to be organic conditions treatable with drugs (or, like homosexuality, turn out to be conditions not appropriate to any kind of treatment). Further, many traditional clinical practices have been shown to be ineffectual and/or indistinguishable from ordinary experience or nothing at all.
In the final analysis, the present state of psychology is the best answer to the original inquiry about whether it is scientific, because if human psychology were as grounded in science as many people believe, many of its historical and contemporary assertions would have been falsified by its own theoretical and clinical failures, and it would be either replaced by something more scientifically rigorous, or simply cast aside for now.
But this is all hypothetical, because psychology and psychiatry have never been based in science, and therefore are free of the constraints placed on scientific theories. This means these fields will prevail far beyond their last shred of credibility, just as religions do, and they will be propelled by the same energy source – belief. That pure, old-fashioned fervent variety of belief, unsullied by reason or evidence.