Scott O. Lilienfeld: Criticisms Of The Scientific Basis Of Psychology

In this article, the author, Scott O. Lilienfeld, examines six commonly used criticisms that attempt to disprove the scientific basis of psychology. He then offers his rebuttals and attempts to explain eight possible reasons as to why the public feels this way. Scott believes that the reason many professionals often criticize psychology is to make their own professions inadequacies look better. In reality though, psychology may be one of the most important sciences there is. The main theoretical points in his paper are the six commonly used criticisms of the scientific basis of psychology and his rebuttals. The first one, “Psychology is Merely Common Sense” says just that. That everything in psychology is a commonly known fact amongst the
The next one states “Psychology Cannot Yield Meaningful Generalizations Because Everyone is Unique.”. As his rebuttal, Lilienfeld argues that yes, of course everyone is unique, but the uniqueness may be entirely irrelevant to the way the treatment in question works. As an example, he offers this; “Although all individuals with melanoma are surely unique, 90% or more of cases of this form of skin cancer are largely curable with early surgery.”. With that he is saying that although everyone is unique, the disease that people may suffer from is all treated the same way. Therefore yes, psychology can yield meaningful generalizations. The fourth public misconception of psychology is that “Psychology Does Not Yield Repeatable Results”. To disprove this, Lilienfeld cites a study done by Larry Hedges in 1987. Hedges decided to test this theory and discovered that the consistency of physics attempting to estimate the mass or lifetime of stable subatomic particles were actually no more consistent than psychological experiments. The fifth statement against psychology is that “Psychology cannot Make Precise Predictions”. For this statement, Lilienfeld writes about a person who
The reader who wrote that implied that any science that yields a wide range of results is not competent. Lilienfeld rebutted this by saying that every experiment is dependent upon different variables, and if one group of professionals conducted the same experiment as another group and ended up with different results, they more than likely used different sources for their variables and should not be considered invalid. Now, last but not least, “Psychology is Not Useful to Society.” The APA’s Benchmark Study has revealed that many people do not see how psychology can apply to many other non-psychological fields such as crime prevention and psychical diseases. Lilienfeld does admit that “one could make a reasonable argument that these fields have made more significant and