Is psychology a science (applied to gender) psyb4 12/12

?

Is psychology a science (applied to gender) ?

To understand if psychology is a science, science itself must be defined. In a traditional sense, the nature of a science is concerned with what we know to be true as opposed to what we simply believe to be true. To this day there have been no absolute agreement on what constitutes a science but the following features are the key to that constitution. Objectivity, dealing with facts in an un-bias, prejudice and expectation manner.  Falsifiability, the refutability of a statement. Paradigm, defined by Kuhn as unified framework of theoretical concepts. Generalisation and replicability, laws made and tested from previous research.

Within the topic of gender, there are many psychological approaches to take; each approach when viewed singularly would define psychology as scientific or non-scientific. The biological approach to gender suggests that gender and sex are defined as the same; they are genetically deterministic and constructed through chromosomes. Shaywitz conducted a study, in which men and women were asked to take an MRI scan whilst completing a language task, this was conducted in a Lab. Lab studies are considered to be scientific as it allows the experimenters to have mass control over variables and could be replicated easily. Whilst the Shaywitz study was objective, the concept lacked ecological validity and may not apply to the real world, which questions the usefulness of a scientific method if it has no application to

Comments

No comments have yet been made