From hard to soft science
I spend the vast majority of my time writing about chemistry and I love it. The great thing about chemistry is that it’s so wide-ranging and underpins so many scientific disciplines that you can write about practically anything – nanotechnology, energy, astronomy, disease, genetically-modified crops – and I have. It’s almost always possible to find a chemistry angle to any scientific or technological story.
But I’m a fairly late convert to chemistry; only really appreciating its many qualities when I started writing about it. At school, it never really grabbed me in the same way as biology, with its seemingly endless emphasis on chemical equations rather than any kind of interesting practical applications, and so I stopped studying it as soon as I could. This explains why I didn’t study chemistry at university but instead chose psychology.
Now I loved my psychology course and found it endlessly fascinating. Indeed, I don’t think I would have become a science writer if I hadn’t studied psychology, because a psychology degree definitely teaches you how to write. I had quite a few friends at university who were studying chemistry and they seemed to spend all their time in the laboratory, whereas I spent all mine writing essays. So I became steeped in conducting background research, drawing together disparate bits of information and framing coherent arguments.
Psychology, however, is the archetypal ‘soft’ science and I constantly had to refute claims that it isn’t a proper science. Most of these came from my dad, who trained as a physicist and would take me down the pub to argue almost every time I came back home. Now, my argument then, as now, is that psychology is a proper science, because it employs the classic scientific method of developing hypotheses, coming up with experiments to test those hypotheses and then refining the hypotheses based on the results. Just like physics or chemistry.
The problem it has is that, unlike physics or chemistry, the phenomena it studies are mental process and behaviour, often human, and these are necessarily subjective. You need to ask your subjects what they’re thinking and feeling, or observe their behaviour when they know they’re being watched. This can often make it difficult to design objective, scientific experiments or to interpret the results, hence psychology’s reliance (some would say over-reliance) on complex statistical analysis. But I still think it’s a proper science and has resulted in important discoveries and theories in many areas, including cognition, sensory perception, evolutionary psychology and group behaviour.
The second main criticism of psychology, which mainly relates to its more ‘social’ areas such as group behaviour and child development, is that many of its findings are ‘obvious’ and simply common-sense. This is a criticism to which I have an increasing amount of sympathy.
Now psychologists wheel out two main defences to this argument. The first is that common-sense knowledge is occasionally proved wrong by psychological experiments; the second is that, even when the common-sense knowledge is confirmed, at least it has now been proved ‘scientifically’. I accepted these defences without question when I was studying psychology, but they really don’t hold up too well to closer inspection.
For a start, my psychology lecturers always seemed to come up with the same example of common-sense knowledge being proved wrong (which unfortunately I can’t remember). But that indicates that common-sense knowledge isn’t proved wrong very often. The obvious response to the second defence is ‘So’; I mean does every little bit of common-sense knowledge we have, however mundane, need to be proved ‘scientifically’. Somehow I doubt it.
Now I see a fair amount of this ‘proving’ of common-sense knowledge, because often a press release is put out about it. Most recently, US psychologists discovered that young children are distracted by background television, even when it’s showing an adult programme. Anyone with a child could have told you that. When my eldest daughter (who’s five) is playing while the television's on, I often have to turn it off to gain her full attention, even if it’s the news.
But instead of observing a child for five minutes, these psychologists conducted a whole study funded by the US National Science Foundation. Couldn’t that money have been spent better elsewhere, even if it was still on something to do with children’s understanding of television, which is an interesting and important topic?
The real problem with studies like this is that they leave all of psychology wide open to attack by ‘hard’ scientists, who continue to question its scientific credentials. It even brings criticism from someone whose allegiance has switched from psychology to chemistry.
