Could or should psychology be called a science?

Many psychologists would state that ‘psychologies inability to predict human behaviour could be taken as proof that psychology isn’t a science because science works on the principals that if you observe something enough times you will be able to understand it and predict what will happen in the future.’ Science however, began like psychology; without all the answers and indeed even modern medical science cannot predict all the answers e.g. Modern medicinal science doesn’t know how to cure cancer because they don’t know how it will react to different drugs. We would demand a far more complex analysis from a psychologist than we would from other scientists. We might ask a psychologist what a human will do, this question could be considered as broad as asking a physicist what will happen to a specific drop of water in the ocean. There are a great deal of variables influencing human behaviour, therefore making it unrealistic to expect that people’s behaviour could be predicted from observing just one or two variables, similarly in physics; the behaviour of particles can’t be predicted due to the fact that not all of the determinants of the particles behaviour can be observed at once. Psychology cannot be discounted as a science just due to the fact that we don’t know the cause of something. As a psychologist you should appreciate the fact that humans have an inability to know everything and just because we don’t know the cause it doesn’t mean that it isn’t there.

If psychology were a science there would be some key issues that would need sorting before people accepted its status. The knowledge gained through psychological research might be mis-used. Given to those in political or economic power psychological research could mean that humans have an inability to defend themselves against certain ideas that were being forced upon them. If psychology became a science then humans would have to be tested upon to gain more accurate results and to create complex laws about them. These experiments might be unethical, for example we have seen the research that Milgram did, however even though it was controversial the participants agreed that they were unharmed and that they were glad to have participated. There would also be strict ethical guidelines should humans be tested on. Many psychologists believe that the reason psychology shouldn’t be a science is due to the mysterious and uncertain nature of it. The fact that we don’t understand ‘love’ might make it seem more magical and exciting, something that appeals to human nature. The advantages to understanding something like love would mean that we could prevent areas such as divorce, break up and heartbreak, causing a less painful world for humans.

The complexity of areas of psychology, such as love and hate, means that inevitably the mystery and human mis-understanding surrounding such phenomena would be unlikely to be removed.