Second blog -- answers to an ocean of prompts |
Prompt: Do you believe analyzing human behavior or psychology is a young science in comparison with other sciences? =============== I don’t think analyzing human behavior, called psychology in our time, is a young science. The proof to my understanding is in the oldest manuscripts and even those legends or whatever we have unearthed that were written on stones and tablets. We have called this observation of human behavior psychology after 1879 when the German scientist Wilhelm Wundt brought it to his laboratory and started experimenting with it. Since not every science has to need a laboratory experimentation to be called a science, I believe it is erroneous to say that psychology began with Wundt’s experimentations. Another point is the term science itself was coined in the 1830s. Besides, any area of study whose name ends with –logy begins with the thought and the philosophy of it. This makes psychology one of the oldest fields of study. Having said all that, the reason why psychology today sounds like gobbledygook is because so many different approaches and the drastically varying results of invalid laboratory experiments have made it so, to strengthen the opinion that psychology is a new science. Maybe psychology would fare better if large masses of people were to be observed in real life, in their natural environments--like the ancients did--rather than in laboratories where the experiments muddle up the subjects’ behaviors to add to the gigantic amounts of confusion this field is dealing with. |