Chapter 17 conclusion

This concludes the book that outlines "this is psychology."This sketch is rough, but it should go a long way toward understanding how the discipline of psychology works and how to evaluate new psychological claims.Our sketches revealed the following: 1. Advances in psychology are made through the study of solvable empirical problems.This progress has been uneven because psychology is made up of many different subfields, some of which have more difficult problems than others. 2. Psychologists develop falsifiable theories to explain their findings. 3. Concepts in the theory have operational definitions that evolve over time as evidence accumulates.

4. The theories are tested by systematic empirical methods, and the data collected in this way are publicly available, that is, it allows other scientists to repeat the experiments and offer criticism. 5. Psychologists' data and theories enter the field of science only when they are published in scientific journals that have undergone a peer-review process. 6. Positivism is systematic because it follows the logic of control and manipulation, which are also properties of true experiments. 7. Psychologists use many different methods to arrive at their conclusions, each with different strengths and weaknesses.

8. In many cases, conclusions can only be drawn after the slow accumulation of data from many experiments. 9. The behavior law that is finally revealed is usually a probabilistic relationship. In 1961, British psychologist Donald Broadbent said something that is as relevant today as it was then.For us, it serves as a neat summary of how to put psychology in perspective: