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The question has often been raised in the past and is perhaps raised even today as to whether psychology is a science. People who raise these questions compare psychology with physics, chemistry and other sciences and start wondering how we can study the behaviour of human beings in the same way as properties of matter or investigation of chemical changes.
To a certain extent such a question is justified because of the very nature of the subject-matter of psychology, that is, behaviour. The physicist or chemist investigates processes and events which remain Stable and constant to a large extent. This makes it possible to measure and predict with a reasonable degree of accuracy. But this is not the case with human behaviour.
Firstly, human behaviour appears to be much more unpredictable than the reactions of physical and chemical substances.
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Secondly, it is found that human behaviour shows a lot of variation from individual to individual.
Given the same circumstances, people differ widely from each other and the same person behaves in different ways at different times though the circumstances appear to be the same. This type of situation appears bewildering and makes one wonder how even measurement, let alone prediction, is ever possible.
Let us look into this and examine why behaviour is so variable. The answer is that human behaviour is just much more complex than the reactions of physical substances. Man is much more sensitive. It is this which makes behaviour more complex. So, the difference between human behaviour and other events or occurrences is only in the degree of complexity and there is no other basic difference. This means that we should employ different types of methods and analysis.
At this point we may even examine the concept of science itself. The concept of science is not a fixed and static concept. For example, until recently mathematics was treated as a discipline falling under the category of liberal arts even though physics and chemistry made extensive use of mathematics.
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Similarly, for a long time, laboratory experimentation was regarded as the only legitimate method in science. But with the expansion of fields like geology, astronomy, geography and other disciplines, methods like field survey, observation, data collection etc., came to be accepted.
All this shows that the term science is today not used in the same way as during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, it means, not a body of knowledge but an approach to understand and study events. In simple terms, any investigation or enquiry which is systematic, careful and methodical is scientific. Thus, economics, history, political science etc., are today regarded as sciences. They are known as social sciences.
Similarly we may talk of behavioural sciences which include psychology, sociology and anthropology. The scientist today does not look for a simple and isolated cause-and-effect relationship. He is interested in a comprehensive understanding of things and events in nature. He does not look for simple and mechanical explanations.
Twentieth century physics is totally different from the physics of the nineteenth century. This shows that what is considered science today is different from the traditional concept of science. In the light of this, the reader will appreciate that psychology is a science though very much different from the other sciences.
Its methods are scientific though different from those of other sciences. As a science it deals with phenomena much more complex, and, therefore, not very predictable. This only means that the challenges before the psychologist are more difficult but certainly not insurmountable. It is a science with a difference.
Yet another factor which makes psychology a different type of science is that whereas other sciences investigate things around man, psychology studies man himself. Of course, biological sciences do study man but psychology does it with a difference. It is interested in behaviour, which is more subtle, less obvious and, of course, more varied, whereas the bodily processes are to a large extent uniform. This is not the case with human actions and their motivations.