# Introduction to Psychological Science
## What is Science? Philosophy and Demarcation
What is science? Well, many books have been written about it, and it proves very hard to strictly define. Philosophers of science have even encountered, what they call, ‘the demarcation problem’. This refers to the fact that is very hard (perhaps impossible) to clearly define a distinction between what is a scientific and what is not. Colloquially we know what scientific is, it concerns doing systematic research, using certain methods of investigation. What is not a science may be clear to us too. Me baking pancakes, or raising my kids, is not science.
There’s also ‘pseudoscience’, this can be more tricky to see. Pseudosciences make claims that may sound scientific, but very often their methods of investigation are not up to par. The findings of their research (perhaps I should write ‘research’ in quotation marks), are biased, one-off results, or heavily influenced by one or more ‘believers’. Obvious examples are astrology, homeopathy, creationism, to name a few. One problem is that some non-scientific theory of today, just could prove right in the future. Note that a little over 100 years ago there were many great physicists and philosophers of who vehemently disbelieved in the existence of atoms. They may well have called it unscientific. Today we know that the atom is a very powerful model of reality. But, more often it is the other way around. Scientific theories of the past have often been disproven, or replaced by a better theory, but some of them still stick. For example, animal magnetism (or mesmerism) is such a theory. Some people still think that certain practices like ‘laying on hands’ can be healing. Another example is crystal healing. Shops still sell those ‘healing’ crystals today. For today’s scientists this is all ‘charlatanism’.
In modern universities’ psychology faculties we (faculty) are, and you (students) will be, proper scientifically trained psychologists, and we will have to know our share of psychological science. We will not embark on charlatanism, although there will always be people who studied psychology, and following this path nevertheless. Personally I wonder what went wrong with them, but we’ll not further explore this. We will also not go into the details of philosophy of science here. For now it suffices to know that the demarcation problem exists.
In the below we will show what makes psychological science a proper science, in our current understanding and, on our side of the demarcation. Psychological science is about _human behaviour and mental processes_. It is the _systematic_ study of human mental processes and its functions, especially those affecting behaviour in a given context. In psychology we try to find information about human mental processes by looking at behaviour. You may now ask: “Hm, what exactly is a ‘_systematic’_ study?”.
## Introducing the Empirical Cycle
You may have encountered psychological research in some shape or form earlier in your education. Often it is taught in the first introductory parts of courses in psychology. We there probably first asked ourselves if psychology is a science and what is needed to make psychological research scientific. There and in other parts of the program the _empirical cycle_ may have been introduced. We will limit ourselves to the science of psychology, although the empirical cycle is much more broadly applicable.
If you’d rather like to answer ‘no’ to the question if psychology is a science then you may want to find another topic or place to study. 😊
_Figure 1 Empirical cycle in psychology (portrait: prof dr A.D. de Groot (1914-2006), Dutch psychologist who ‘brought empirical cycle thinking to psychology’ in the Netherlands). (Picture: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/De-Groots-empirical-cycle-We-added-the-Whewell-Peirce-Reichenbach-distinction-between_fig1_326114900)_
Remember, we’re psychologists, so our scientific questions are about human behaviour and mental processes. So, how do we study these? What is the ‘scientific method’ for psychological scientists? It’s actually not much different from that of other sciences. Figure 1 shows the empirical cycle as it was first introduced to Dutch psychological science by A.D. de Groot (De Groot 1961).
A nice aspect visible in Figure 1 is that empirical research combines two sides of (psychological) science:
- the creative context of discovery (right half of the figure),
- the statistical context of justification (left half of the figure),
a perfect combination of the creative (wild, original, discovery) side and the (formal, numerical, calculative) side.
## Step-by-step guide through the empirical cycle
The empirical cycle typically includes the following phases:
1. Based on observation, old knowledge and existing data, empirical facts are collected.
2. Exploration and speculation leads to the formulation of new ideas for research and specific hypotheses are formulated on the basis of the observations.
3. On the basis of those hypotheses, some specific new predictions are deduced.
4. The predictions will be tested, i.e. the predictions are empirically tested by collecting new data, which is what is usually seen as ‘research’, as a lot of activity is often needed to do measurements. The researchers have to decide what exactly will need to be measured, and how (operationalisation of variables), what the experimental design needs to be, perform many practical matters like planning lab space, subjects, assistance, etc., and statistically analysing the collected results.
5. Last, the findings are interpreted, discussed and evaluated on their theoretical viability. Often new ideas are generated that can be examined by a new empirical cycle, turning the whole exercise in a helix rather than a circle (see Figure 5).
In Figure 2 another rendition of the empirical cycle is presented, taken from the context of teaching in psychology. Note that the different visualisations of the empirical research cycle are very similar.
_Figure 2 Variation on the empirical cycle._
Many students may have taken part as subjects in research activities. Most psychology students have to partake in several psychological studies in their labs to obtain a required number of ‘experimental subject’-points. You will also likely have to follow a course focusing on a _Research Practical_, where you will set up your own experiment, jointly in a small group of students. In such a practical you may make full pass through the empirical cycle. These studies are often a part of a larger study by colleague psychological scientists.
## Competencies in Psychological Research
In the new BSc-programme at UM we have defined five different competencies that we find a psychologist graduating with this title from UM, needs to possess. These are rather general competencies, not depending on a specific university or culture, they are important for psychologists worldwide. The five competencies, and briefly their contents, are:
1. Psychological expert: knowledge of psychology and its applications,
2. Researcher: scientific inquiry and critical thinking,
3. Psychological citizen: values in psychology,
4. Communicator: psychological literacy and communicative skills,
5. Personal/professional development: self-regulation, collaboration and leadership.
They are presented around the empirical cycle in Figure 3. These five competencies can be seen in relation to the empirical cycle, as not every competency may be equally relevant for each phase in psychological scientific research. But Figure 3 illustrates that the competencies are really very general and hence may not be uniquely linked to specific parts of the cycle.
_Figure 3 The empirical cycle, and the five competencies from the UM BSc-programme in psychology._
It is also possible to connect some general activities with the empirical cycle in . In Figure 4 overlapping regions of the empirical cycle are indicated that contain specific types of activities.
Obviously, before embarking on an experimental study proper, it has to be prepared (red curve in Figure 4). The preparatory stage consists of many smaller activities:
1. reading and thinking,
2. thinking up a question,
3. formulate a research hypothesis,
4. draw up a study design,
5. decide on operationalisation of variables,
6. plan the analyses (laboratory work, survey, interview, etc.),
7. get ethical approval.
As can be seen, quite some preparation is involved in scientific research. As said, the activities can overlap. It is possible to already write parts of the research report (blue curve in Figure 4) while some preparatory activities are going on simultaneously. The different activities can be distributed over different persons, so one person can be working on making a study design and planning the experiment, while another is writing the text for the ethical committee, and yet another may already be setting up the report and e.g. writing the introduction section. On the other hand, there are many smaller studies, often those in which students (BSc, MSc, PhD) are involved, in which the student has to do all the tasks her- or himself. Of course this is intentional as one has to learn about all the research related activities.
_Figure 4 The empirical cycle embellished with four general phases in research: preparatory, writing, data collection/analysis, publish)._
What we’ve skipped thus far, and will not present in much more detail here other than naming it, is the writing of a proposal for a research grant. Research costs money, and much research projects are funded by governments, industry or specific scientific associations. An important skill of researchers is to write a proposal, following the rules a specific grant requires, to convince a grant evaluation committee that their research is worthy of receiving a grant. The size of grants can differ from a few thousand euros, to millions of euros. It’s a much debated system. We’ll limit ourselves here to just mentioning that the ‘reading and writing’-, and ‘think of a question’-part of the empirical cycle, is often devoted to a grant proposal writing activity.
Let’s continue to look at the activities around the empirical cycle as presented in Figure 4. As said, the writing phase overlaps the preparatory phase, but it also overlaps the ‘data collection/analysis’ part (green curve in Figure 4). In short, writing parts of the report, or paper or thesis is not limited to any specific phase of the empirical cycle. Obviously one cannot start writing at the very start of the preparatory part, as one would not yet know what to write about.
The ‘data collection/analysis’ part of the empirical cycle contains several distinct activities:
1. collecting data,
2. analysing data,
3. interpreting and discussing results,
4. reading, writing and polishing (pertaining both to writing and reporting the results of the (statistical) analysis, including e.g. designing tables and figures.
The last phase (pink/purple in Figure 4) refers to the process of publishing and communicating the results of the study. This phase can contain such matters as:
- writing a scientific article for publication in a scientific journal,
- writing a research report, e.g. for a client, sponsor, subsidy body, etc.,
- making a scientific poster for a conference or other (scientific) gathering,
- preparing an oral presentation for a conference, or other (scientific) gathering.
The above mainly refer to _scientific_ publishing activities, but getting research results out to the _non-scientific_ _public_ has become more important over the last couple of years. Writing for a non-expert audience is a special skill, not automatically taught in academic environments, nor a skill that every academic writer possesses.
_Figure 5 Not just a single empirical cycle, but an empirical helix. Next empirical cycles add to the findings from previous ones._
More often than not scientific experimentation, also in the psychological sciences, isn’t finished after once circling the empirical cycle. As is illustrated in Figure 5, after the cycle has been completed once, a second, or third round (or more) can be started. The first study may:
- have given results that need more testing,
- need to be replicated under different circumstances,
- show a lack of knowledge in a specific part of the study.
There can be many reasons for further testing. Often a larger experiment consists of multiple ‘empirical cycles’, as part of one main big cycle.