Science Has Come a Long Way

Science Has Come a Long Way

  • Submitted By: aeb87
  • Date Submitted: 01/15/2009 8:10 AM
  • Category: Psychology
  • Words: 291
  • Page: 2
  • Views: 710

Science has come a long way since the empiricist days which saw t mind as passive, and assumed we only developed knowledge from experiences and our sensory perceptions. It cannot be denied that the mind is very active and plays a very important role in developing knowledge about the world. In psychology’s early days, there was the school of behaviourists who believed that behaviour was caused by stimulus-response associations, whilst the mind was passive. It was when the cognitive revolution arrived that this was challenged, and proposed the idea that behaviour is the result of representing and processing information in the brain. This follows the scientific belief that the mind is in fact active, and also plays a very important role in everyday life decisions. Although psychology is a very broad subject, it is generally tested in scientific ways, as psychologists seek observable, empirical, and measurable evidence. This evidence is usually collected through observation and scientific controlled experiments, and hypotheses are formulated and tested, and theories are developed. The qualitative methods focused on observing behaviours in their natural state and surroundings may not be as controlled as some scientific experiments, but the findings are still analysed in scientific ways. The argument that studies in laboratories lack validity due to the possibility of participants saying what they think experimenters want them to can be over ruled by the methods used to prevent this. The most common being mild deception in the consent form about the hypothesis, and his is followed up by a debrief fully explaining the truth and why they were misled. A major problem with non scientific research is how subjective it is, which leads to personal opinion being formed, as opposed to knowledge and justified belief.

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