The Use of Empirical Data and Scientific Method in Psychology

Psychology, though not originally called that, began as a sector of philosophy because of the questions that philosophers often ask, the main one being, “Why are we the way we are?”  Historically, psychologists and philosophers would answer this with anecdotal evidence. For example, Franz Josef Gall as a child, noticed that a boy in his class who was exceptionally linguistic, had bulging eyes and through this, grew to believe that this boy’s eyes bulged because the front part of his brain was overdeveloped. Since the boy in his class had advanced language skills and bulging eyes, Gall made the jump that the front part of the brain was responsible for language.

Obviously nowadays, the psychological community would reject this type of anecdotal evidence. This is because we as psychologists and psychology students have shifted to a more empirical process of gathering data in order to support theories and hypotheses. John Locke was instrumental in creating this idea because he believed that knowledge comes from our senses and reflection as opposed to through logical conversation or arguments. Basically, he is saying that all knowledge comes from or is based on experience. Because of the popularity this idea gained, the method of research was an empirical approach, which is an approach to research that includes observing and experimenting in order to gather facts. 

During the late 1800’s psychology and psychological research was drastically changed when scientists like Wilhelm Wundt allowed for the marriage of philosophical theory and scientific methods, thus creating the systematic study of behavior, which we now call psychology. Wundt’s idea of structuralism brought the ideas of psychological theory to a laboratory setting where scientists could study aspects of human mind and behavior through experimental techniques, using empirical data to back up their observations. Using the scientific method, psychologists could hypothesize what they believed to be causing certain behavior (such as physical features of individual’s skulls) and gather data to either support that hypothesis or reject the hypothesis. Using the experimental method, we can learn so much more because even when theories are shown to be incorrect, we can acknowledge them as such and continue to study more options. That is part of the reason why psychology has come so far in the 20^th Century.

Today, there are very strict guidelines for how psychologists can conducts research. Using experimental methods, psychologists can more easily provide data that supports their claim as opposed to making statements that are not based on evidence. The field of psychology has heavily adopted the scientific method since it’s introduction in the late 1800’s and because of that, psychology has become a much more credible area of research in an attempt to understand human behavior.

                                                              Wilhelm Wundt, 1875

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/21st-century-aging/201101/empiricism-and-psychoanalytic-therapy  -  An article by Tamara McClintock Geenberg, concerning Empiricism and Psychoanalytic Theory

Nick Martin

Rebecca Carlone