Psychology is like examining a black box and learning as much about it as one can without looking inside.
As opposed to quantum physics, where the way you look at it will quite literally change what it is. Franck Laloë's 100+ page paper "
Do we really understand Quantum Physics?" has a final section on the interpretations and notes it is "clearly out of the question to give here an exhaustive discussion of all possible interpretations. That would probably be an impossible task!"
When I look at an fMRI in progress, the scans aren't changing the person's brain. Quantum physicists can't actually obtain a system to measure without constructing an idealized one artificially. But its a "hard" science. Right.
To look inside the box requires a different but related area of research, like neuroscience.
Again, most neuroscientists are psychologists (actually, they fall into two groups: cognitive psychologist, and everybody else- quantum physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, psychiatrists, information theorists, engineers, etc.; however, the core has always been psychology because they invented behavioral research while psychiatrists would listen to people talk about their mothers).
I don't think that anyone is arguing that psychology isn't helpful.
No. A microbiologist who co-authored a book on how "the left" is anti-science has created criteria that he claims socials sciences clearly don't meet (psychology isn't a social science), although he admits that physicists don't meet it either.
Fields have become increasingly interdisciplinary for years now. The "helpful" psychologists are behind what you wear, watch, listen to, read, and see much of the time. Because when a business wants to advertise, they turn to consumer psychologists. When tv, movie, and music producers want to test an artist's impact or understand the market, they get psychologists. When you use Google, Amazon.com, Netflix, and just about every site their is that tries to customize for you, the algorithms were developed starting back in the 40s and continued as psychologists developed and formalized learning theories which could then be applied to various computational intelligence approaches. Research on the visual system which is used in everything from graphics design to augmented cognition is again based in psychology.
Every single science that deals with humans, whether as clients or as consumers of developed products (from cars to computers to cognitive enhancement) has increasingly needed to use participants in behavioral studies in order to develop or release what will maximize profits, be the most useful, set a new trend, etc. And psychology is the behavioral science.
I view physics and economics as both extremely important, but not directly comparable, for example.
And yet they are compared by members of both fields and of neither, sometimes all in one volume. "Springer Complexity is an interdisciplinary program publishing the best research and academic-level teaching on both fundamental and applied aspects of complex systems cutting
across all traditional disciplines of the natural and life sciences, engineering, economics, medicine, neuroscience, social and computer science"
Do you have any idea how many volumes and journals
Springer Complexity puts out which compare physics and economics among many other sciences, often in the same volume?
You pointed out yourself how psychology has been problematic in some areas.
The worst being probably neuroscience. Psychologists have been running and improving behavioral research for over a century. But MATLAB, R, Maple, SAS, etc., are all pretty new and the people who go into a number of sciences, even outside of the social & behavioral (although the worst cases are there) do not have the adequate understanding of mathematics for the models and techniques they use. Unfortunately, rather than either learn more or consult with a statistician, they now have the tools to perform countless tests which they only understand in that it has something to do with what they want to do. So researchers can, without ever taking calculus or linear algebra, run various pre-packaged point-and-click analyses dealing with high-dimensional data. But the worst offenders are mostly the people you seem to classify as not psychologists: those in neuroscience, visual systems, conceptual processing, psychiatry, neurology, etc. And many social scientists.
I'm the first to admit there's a whole lot of god-awful research coming out of the social and behavioral sciences. But a most of it comes from those with backgrounds in "hard sciences" and social sciences. There's a lot of awful psychology/behavioral research too, but again that is an unfortunate consequence of computational software: what used to be decent enough exposure to mathematics is now woefully inadequate because an undergrad course in stats and a grad course in multivariate stats is simply not nearly adequate given the kind of models and tests used in many studies.
One would think that a primary application of psychology, the study of the mind and behavior, would be to apply it to help people with mental or behavioral problems.
Only that hasn't been the primary application of psychology. It wasn't until around the 1960s that serious growth in clinical psychology began to rival clinicians (psychiatrists, neurologists, and social workers for the most part). Before that, most psychologists were behaviorists (hence "behavioral science"). They were the ones who created experimental designs to test theories with subjects, whether mice or
Little Albert.
But psychiatry as well as non-medical psychotherapy have had a very mixed track record. The fact that the DSM once included homosexuality is an easy example.
It's an easy example of psychiatry creating a market. The DSM is published by the American Psychiatric Association. The DSM I and II were little pamphlets few used. It wasn't until the medical sciences started viewing psychiatry as not a medical field, and the social workers and mental health counselors argued that, as psychiatrists weren't practicing medicine, they shouldn't be accorded any special status, that all of a sudden the massive DSM III came out and all the disorders went from the psychoanalytic "spectrum" approach to each disorder corresponding to a specific, medical disease. There was no basis for this. We pretty much know it's wrong. Comorbidity rates are astronomical and if mental health disorders are diseases than we're experiencing the worst outbreak of disease in the history of humanity. Thankfully, the biomedical view psychiatry invented is wrong. How wrong is debatable, but it is definitely wrong. And psychologist have been fighting for years to get this strangle-hold that psychiatrists have over the mental health field removed, as there is no reason for it. Going to medical school provides far less training about the brain or mental disorders than most social workers have, let alone clinical psychologists.
Much of it is influenced by culture, and much of it is put forth in non-falsifiable ways. Falsifiability is a key part of science.
I wonder who came up with that criterion. Probably a "hard" science type. Oh wait. It was a philosopher of science.
The application of using psychology to understand and treat mental illness; only sometimes falsifiable.
You seem to equate psychology with clinical psychology. Why?
