Issues and Debates: Psychology as a Science

Question 1

Names the reasons why Cognitive psychology IS a science.

Answer 1

Clive Wearing was a real-life example of how memory works as MRI scans revealed damage to his hippocampus due to amnesia, which causes him to have memory that only lasts a few seconds. MRI scans are objective evidence.

Baddeley’s memory experiment into semantic and acoustic encoding was tightly controlled e.g. words written around the room and using visual slides rather than someone reading word list to eliminate extraneous variables allowing the experiment to have high replicability.

Wilcoxon Signed rank test - statistical hypothesis testing, used when you have an experiment with repeated measures design and the data is at least ordinal. (Baddeley used this when comparing scores of participants in their 4th recall trial with their scores 15 mins later in the ‘forgetting’ test. His data could easily be turned into ordinal data as he ranked the scores from highest to lowest and gave each participant a rank based on where their score appeared.)

Sebastien and Hernandez-Gil used a sample of 570 people, making their results about digit span highly generalisable and true for most people

Theories e.g. multi store model of memory are very simple, fitting in with the key scientific idea of reductionism in order to have a better understanding of processes e.g. memory

Question 2

Names the reasons why Cognitive psychology IS NOT a science.

Answer 2

Reconstructive memory: Bartlett war of the ghosts story not scientific method because wasn’t controlled e.g. asked students to recall the story on the street years after they previously heard it so too many extraneous variables.

Case studies e.g. KF, HM, Clive Wearing are too specific and not generalisable to whole populations as specific things about their memory may not apply to all people especially after personal events caused their memory problems e.g. HM or KF (lack of body of knowledge)

Question 3

Names the reasons why Social psychology IS a science.

Answer 3

Empirical evidence - social impact theory, agency theory (Milgram), realistic conflict theory (Sheriff), social identity theory (Tajfel)

Milgram - Objectivity bases a judgement on data (how many voltages that the ppts went up to) rather than opinion

Sherif - objective elements - counted the number of outgroup friendships.

Question 4

Name the reasons why Social psychology IS NOT a science

Answer 4

Subjective interpretation - Realistic conflict theory, the scientists who were assessing the boys behaviour may have made judgements when deciding when the boys were showing hostility

Lack of internal validity as they couldn’t control what the boys were doing when they were not being observed.

Question 5

Name the reasons why Biological psychology IS a science.

Answer 5

The structure of the brain can offer a scientific explanation - e.g. the link between the amygdala and aggression, prefrontal cortex.

Raine; used pet scans to see differences in activity in murderers/non-murderers brains. (replicable study).
PET scans are objective evidence.

Hormones; Hormones is a reductionist view of aggression as we are looking at only one explanation of why it could be occurring.

Cortisol→responsible for regulating emotions of anger or stress→ lack of this hormone→ makes you angrier than others. Other hormones; Oestrogen, testosterone.
Measuring hormones is another objective form of evidence as we can see the amount of a hormone in the blood.

Question 6

Name the reasons why Biological psychology IS NOT a science.

Answer 6

Freud’s psychodynamic theory about the unconscious mind, hypothetical theory that cannot be scientifically measured - non empirical evidence and cant be falsified.

Evolutionary theory can’t be tested scientifically because it goes over a long period of time, not objectively measured (can’t be replicated), post-hoc explanation

Raine- canthomeatal line is subjective as it is different on different people, so a different part of the brain/ activity is being measured.

Question 7

Name the reasons why Learning psychology IS a science.

Answer 7

Controlled experiments to test hypothesis- replicable and hypothesis testing

Behaviour is learned from observations- Bandura’s Bobo doll, children observed adults of the same sex being aggressive to a doll, children then replicated this behaviour to the doll.- empirical evidence

Good control over the children’s prior behaviour as they were left in the room for a amount of time and told not to touch any of the toys inside the room, this made them quite agitated as they were wanting to play with them.

Question 8

Name the reasons why Learning psychology IS NOT a science.

Answer 8

With Bandura’s study, we are unable to observe and measure what is going on in their minds, it is also impossible to control the children’s individual personalities