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calling psychology a soft science is like calling water a soft solid. Science is based on isolating causality in a reliable, repeatable manner. Human behavior i

• cmrdporcupine 11y ago
  Absolutely agree. And what is scarier is when reductionist psychology gets armed with a pharmaceutical cudgel in the form of psychiatry. Works for some, sometimes, but one always has the feeling they don't really know why...
• muzani 11y ago
  Well, science is about doing experiments. It's really difficult to isolate causality with psychology, but possible to at least identify patterns. And then it takes more experiments to peel off those patterns. This is a really good case of science at work. It's an experiment that specifically targeted ego depletion and couldn't find it. I find it a bit worrying that so many people immediately agree to the conclusion proposed by these experiments. Ego depletion is one thing, but there are other well-known effects like Pavlov's Dog.
  • make3 11y ago
    they say credibility is hard to gain and easy to lose. Physics has as a standard to do predictions reproducible exactly to a something like 8 standard deviations. Psychology, as a domain, appears to be struggling to make predictions that are reproducible "up to 40% of the time". Now, even if we say they are twice that as an approximate totally unscientific show of good faith, we're still really far at 20% reproducible from reliable, credible knowledge as is promised by other fields, and would still make the field pretty murky at best