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Debates in psychology

Debates in psychology. Is psychology a science?. What you need to know:. Describe the debate over what science is, including how far psychology fits the definition Evaluate whether psychology should be called a science, including where ethnocentrism and cultural relativity fit.

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Debates in psychology

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  1. Debates in psychology • Is psychology a science?

  2. What you need to know: • Describe the debate over what science is, including how far psychology fits the definition • Evaluate whether psychology should be called a science, including where ethnocentrism and cultural relativity fit.

  3. Psychology and scientific subject matter • Consider the following questions • Are the subjects of psychology scientific? • Are the methods scientific?

  4. Think Obese Fat Rat

  5. To be scientific • Research needs to be • Objective • Falsifiable • Replicable

  6. Psychology and science • Falsifiability – inferential stats indicate the extent to which our results are due to chance and not a real difference/relationship • Paradigms -there should be a single paradigm if psychology is truly a science. Psychology has a number of different paradigms so is thought to be pre science. • Discourses -lab situations don’t go very far in understanding discourse

  7. Maybe there are reasons for not ‘doing science’ • Holism – the whole is more than the sum of the parts, maybe we should break everything done to its constituent parts! • Humanism – we are more than just specimins • Although scientific method is reliable it is not always valid • Social constructionism – we should study constructs which will tell us more about real life.

  8. How scientific are the 5 as approaches? • The social approach • The cognitive approach • The psychodynamic approach • The biological approach • The learning approach

  9. examzone • With reference to one approach in psychology describe ways in which it is scientific • Explain why you think psychology is not scientific. You have 45 minutes in the LRC to produce a PowerPoint presentation answering these 2 questions. You will present this in the next session. Please also produce a handout for the other members of the class to fill in as they listen to your presentation.

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