The Perception of Psychology as Unscientific: The Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying The Perception That Psychology Is Not A Science
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While psychology can be straightforwardly shown to be a science, many do not perceive it to be a scientific discipline.Although researchers have examined this phenomenon (e.g., Lilienfeld, 2011), they have yet to empirically identify the cognitive mechanisms that might be responsible for it.One possibility is that a dual-process account of cognition might explain the phenomenon; that is, while individuals may understand that psychology is a science, they may not implicitly associate psychology with science.The goal of this thesis is to explore this possibility.The participants completed a discrete free association task (Nelson et al., 2004) for academic disciplines that included the natural sciences and psychology.The results demonstrated that psychology was found to be conceptually different from science and the natural sciences.Moreover, the results suggest that science might be conceived of as the topics and objects of study rather than its methodologies.In addition, participants rated each discipline on a number of dimensions (e.g., difficulty, importance, and concreteness).The results demonstrated that, while psychology scored above the mean on the rating of scientific, the discipline scored below the mean on dimensions that significantly predicted the dimension scientific: difficulty and concreteness.Based on the results, suggestions are provided to assist in improving the perception of psychology as genuinely scientific.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".