Identify and outline one reason Sally could give Nisha to show that psychology is scientific. (3 marks)
Psychology Homework.
- Sally had just completed a course in psychology and was telling her friend Nisha, how interesting she found the “scientific study of behaviour”. Nisha comments, “I did not know that psychology is a scientific subject”.
Identify and outline one reason Sally could give Nisha to show that psychology is scientific. (3 marks)
Science has replication, for example students who do the scientific test to see whether a substance is an acid or an alkali takes place every year in thousands of different schools across the country. Also the experiment must have also been done hundreds of years ago to discover what acids and alkalis actually are. If a psychologist does an experiment then it would be published, therefore other psychologists (if they criticised the experiment) would have the opportunity to replicate the experiment to see if they come to the same conclusion. For example Sir C Bart set up an experiment which looked into intelligence, he found that intelligence is mainly inherited therefore he set up grammar schools in 1944. However a few years later Leon Karnin went back and replicated the experiment to which he found lots of inconsistencies. Thus on the basis of replication psychology can be seen to be a scientific subject.