Writing on Scientific American blogs, Maria Konnikova makes a point numerous scientists have made, yet one that makes science journalists and many psychologists bristle with irritation.
It’s simply a timely illustration of a far deeper trend, a tendency that is strong in almost all humanities and social sciences, from literature to psychology, history to political science. Every softer discipline these days seems to feel inadequate unless it becomes harder, more quantifiable, more scientific, more precise. That, it seems, would confer some sort of missing legitimacy in our computerized, digitized, number-happy world. But does it really?
Science journalists need social science survey analyses to have stuff to write about, so they think it is stupid when scientists say psychology is not a science. Konnikova is a Ph.D. candidate in psychology so it is not like she is some elitist in physics protecting a fiefdom and it will be hard for Ed Yong to dismiss hers as "ignorant claims about how psychology isn't a science" the way he did with people outside the corporate media clique who happen to have PhDs in science.
Instead, she is making a point I have often made; it isn't that psychology (or the humanities) are not valuable, they just need not dress up as science to be so. It's reductionism which hurts the field, not helps it.
It’s one of the things that irked me about political science and that irks me about psychology—the reliance, insistence, even, on increasingly fancy statistics and data sets to prove any given point, whether it lends itself to that kind of proof or not. I’m not alone in thinking that such a blanket approach ruins the basic nature of the inquiry.
It isn't just psychology beset with a statistics fetish. As she notes, economics, history, everyone wants to be termed scientific. Heck, I saw a piece yesterday where a computer programmer in academia called herself a Web Scientist.
Insightful stuff. Humanities aren’t a science. Stop treating them like one by Maria Konnikova, Scientific American blogs
H/T Fernando Blanco
