The field is constantly testing those theories WITH data. There is a reason Jung and Freud aren’t taught other than as history in most research programs.
Maybe we are quibbling about the definition of expert, however. I am speaking of published articles written by research psychologists at accredited universities.
I said that they’re moving in the right direction, but they’re not nearly there yet.
I’m primarily talking about, for example, if you’re reading an article in some reputable source about some psychology-related issue, and the writer correctly states “most psychologists maintain that …”. How likely is it that this agreement is derived from careful and unbiased study?
Or if some governmental or other institutional body is deliberating what to do about such-and-such and the mainstream, reputable psychologists who testify or advise them maintain that some course of action is appropriate. How likely is it that this is based on careful and unbiased studies?
And so on.
Not on topic. I’d appreciate it if you simply answered my question.
Your question was a rhetorical device.
No, it was not.
It has been shown that the statistical methods used by the UK sociologists are very deficient and I doubt it’s any different in the U.S.:
“That UK sociology makes relatively little use of statistical methods”
“The deficit in quantitative methods traces to undergraduate programmes in sociology, which typically require little or nothing of the students in statistics, and indeed do not even offer much in the way of statistical coursework.”
“A disturbing result of all this is that most British-trained sociologists cannot read the quantitative literature in sociology with any degree of understanding. Furthermore there appears to be an anti-quant culture – a standard undergraduate methods course will include as much time critiquing the use of quantitative methods as teaching them”
(International Benchmarking Review of UK Sociology, March 2010)
Nothing ever gets proven. However, plenty of hypotheses in psychology do get verified (or at least supported) through experimentation.
And doing things like that are way there are so many journals. Given that the statement is true, you might do an experiment with girls from father only families and boys from mother only families -, girls with older brothers or older sisters, etc., etc. I doubt anyone tries to answer the why question experimentally, though I suppose it is okay to speculate once you have enough supporting data.
Sure, but experimenting with human subjects is a lot cheaper than building giant accelerators. Look at the experiments Dan Ariely describes in Predictably Irrational. Cheap and clever. And of course you have to have controls - if you don’t your stuff will keep getting rejected.
Interesting. My daughter is pioneering a program which will get her two PhDs at once - one in psychology, one in business. Here research is on judgment decision making as applied to economic decisions, and she has a BS in econ also, but she sees a lot of commonality. And she knows a lot of statistics.
Never claimed it was irrefutable. I did claim conservatives a) don’t believe in it and b) don’t want to admit it.
There is no room to question it based on the criteria you proposed.
You question the view if you find some conflict with the validity or reliability of the data.
Its the same way with conservative views. People aren’t hostile to the views because they are conservative, they are hostile because it is wrong. No fundamentalist religionist should ever go into biological science because they would get it wrong
Of course. I never said otherwise; in point of fact, I explicitly stated that Social Sciences are more empirical than Humanities, if less so than the Physical Sciences.
I said that the Social Sciences (all of them, as a group, including econ, poli sci, etc) are not as empirical as the physical sciences. That was it.
Are you going to argue with what I actually said, or keep on arguing about things I didn’t say?
As long as nobody’s arguing the fact that psychology is a bastion of liberal dogma with all the attendant baggage, I’ll continue being amused by the other arguments. 
I don’t ever remember spending a minute of my time worrying about the politics of my professors. Didn’t you have anything important to do in class like take notes or take a nap or check out girls?
Also, nobody has said or supported the idea that “psychology is a bastion of liberal dogma”. That is your misinterpretation of the discussion.
To catch you up:
Nobody thinks what you think. It is you alone who has this “bastion of liberal ideology” thing going through your head.
That’s OK. I was just pushing the hypothesis a little further based on it being “OK to speculate once you have enough supporting data.”
they show that they are liberal… but from inside they are actually not at all liberal…
If conservatives believe psychologists are overwhelmingly liberal, it certainly goes a long way in explaining some of their batshit crazy perceptions of the world. Once they are convinced psychologists are liberal, it stands to reason that conservatives would reject them as dangerous and unreliable. Conservativism is nothing more than a manifestation of untreated mental illness.
There is a flip side. Although their social “center of gravity” is well off into the liberal cluster of opinions and beliefs, psychologists are often* more inclined than the average academic / well-educated person to think that it unhealthy or unfortunate for a person to not share the beliefs and opinions of the prevailing culture around them. They value normative behavior and tend to think of unusual or eccentric behavior as representing some kind of developmental pathology, as a compensating mechanism or as ‘acting out’ etc… and any belief system that worships normativeness like that is inherently conservative in the way that really matters. It’s anti-individual, anti-freedom and operates from a perspective that wet-blankets most possibilities of living differently or enacting social change.
No cite at all, I imagine, because your stereotype (generally applied) does not correspond to any reality of which I am aware. To provide a countervailing statement of opinion, I wish to point out that nothing could be further from the truth than what AHunter has described – no cite, sorry – merely opinion and observation.
I think one of the big problems in this thread is the inability to discriminate between psychological as clinically practiced and psychology as an actual science. I believe that AHunter3 may be referring to clinical psychology/psychiatry. An example I can think of is the recently corrected mistake of defining homosexuality as mental illness. More tongue-in-cheek, I’ve noticed that the clinical psychology professors and graduate students are always dressed up like a bunch of corporate conformists.
I think this is true. A huge chunk of DSMIV disorders depend on observing a person believing, thinking, or acting in ways that are contrary to their culture or the people around them. Clinical psychologists are wary of beliefs that are unconventional, radical, unusual, or contentious, seeing them as symptoms. And let’s face it, there’s a grain of truth to that. You can be mentally healthy with radical, unconventional ideas, but if you are, you’re probably out changing the world, not moping around in the shrink’s office about why nobody understands you. But that’s just clinical psychology, not psychological research. They are very different things.