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Why do you think neuroscience is a better way to learn about human behaviour (which is what psychology deals with)? Neuroscience is incredibly difficult and the

Why do you think neuroscience is a better way to learn about human behaviour (which is what psychology deals with)? Neuroscience is incredibly difficult and the brain is super complex. We have learned far far less about human behaviour through neuroscience than through psychology studies. Learning about behaviour through neuroscience is working at the wrong level of abstraction, we're not capable of comprehending large systems at low levels. You cite bias in psych studies, but neuroscience has lots of issues too. See fmri study that can find results on a dead salmon. Also inability of neuroscience tools to figure out what the net of a tiny microprocessor does, let alone anything larger. I wasn't the one who down voted you.

ThomPete 10y ago
What I said was that psychology should be used as an extension of interpreting neuroscientific findings. We haven't learned anything about the brain through psychology we have learned about how humans interpret the brain but we don't have a lot of raw data. That's what neuroscience gives us and so it allow us to focus on interpreting the data rather than making a lot of flawed experiments which are often anecdotal more than anything else. Again I am pretty sure psychology will be seen as alchemy in 50 years if not before. And yes I know you didn't downvote :)
- trishume 10y ago
  Just because psychology doesn't tell us about how the brain functions doesn't mean it isn't useful. Learning about how humans behave in practice is arguably more useful. And yes tons of psych studies are flawed but the reason we have the replication crisis is that we can actually run sufficiently large well-controlled studies that we have some confidence in the results, and when we run those we do learn important things like "that previous study was totally wrong". A lot of things like our knowledge of heuristics and biases (not the scientific ones mentioned earlier but cognitive ones) and our solid psychometric measures have come from psych studies. I do agree with you that we basically shouldn't believe the majority of psych studies, especially if they are in the news. However, the crappy studies help guide where we bother to do the large studies, and provide fodder for the meta-analyses. That's what we learn from.
  - ThomPete 10y ago
    I never said it wasnt useful what i said is that its not the best method anymore and thus shouldn't be a separate faculty but instead be tied to neuroscience exactly to better utilize the raw data which neuroscience gives us. Not really sure why this is such a controversial suggestion.
    - DanBC 10y ago
      It's seen as an overly medical response ("Take your meds, you'll be fine") to a thing that has a mix of biological, psychological, and social causes. Treatments should include the range of bio-psycho-social options, even for the more biological illnesses.
      - ThomPete 10y ago
        We are talking research here there is nothing in my model that hinders anything all it does is realign psychology with were it belongs in a scientific context, otherwise we should still have alchemy too.

ThomPete 10y ago

What I said was that psychology should be used as an extension of interpreting neuroscientific findings. We haven't learned anything about the brain through psychology we have learned about how humans interpret the brain but we don't have a lot of raw data. That's what neuroscience gives us and so it allow us to focus on interpreting the data rather than making a lot of flawed experiments which are often anecdotal more than anything else. Again I am pretty sure psychology will be seen as alchemy in 50 years if not before. And yes I know you didn't downvote :)

trishume 10y ago
Just because psychology doesn't tell us about how the brain functions doesn't mean it isn't useful. Learning about how humans behave in practice is arguably more useful. And yes tons of psych studies are flawed but the reason we have the replication crisis is that we can actually run sufficiently large well-controlled studies that we have some confidence in the results, and when we run those we do learn important things like "that previous study was totally wrong". A lot of things like our knowledge of heuristics and biases (not the scientific ones mentioned earlier but cognitive ones) and our solid psychometric measures have come from psych studies. I do agree with you that we basically shouldn't believe the majority of psych studies, especially if they are in the news. However, the crappy studies help guide where we bother to do the large studies, and provide fodder for the meta-analyses. That's what we learn from.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  I never said it wasnt useful what i said is that its not the best method anymore and thus shouldn't be a separate faculty but instead be tied to neuroscience exactly to better utilize the raw data which neuroscience gives us. Not really sure why this is such a controversial suggestion.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    It's seen as an overly medical response ("Take your meds, you'll be fine") to a thing that has a mix of biological, psychological, and social causes. Treatments should include the range of bio-psycho-social options, even for the more biological illnesses.
    - ThomPete 10y ago
      We are talking research here there is nothing in my model that hinders anything all it does is realign psychology with were it belongs in a scientific context, otherwise we should still have alchemy too.