How much of psychology is guess work and how much is proven?

I read somewhere that psychology is based on educated guess work, like the theory of natural selection, but isn't definitively proven. Is this true/false?|||True. How much of which, who can say?


But psychology is not as much a science as it would like people to think it is. It is art as well as science, and yes involves educated guesswork.


By and large, psychology uses statistics as a substitute for physical experiments and mathematics of science.


But, not to sell it short, psychology has come a long ways in recent decades. A lot of its tools, its therapeutic methods have been shown to be effective. Cognitive therapy is one of its better approaches to helping people overcome problems.


But much of science is in the process of being revised constantly. "We used to think that...but now we know..."|||Psychology, and other social sciences, are not exact sciences. You and I are both "normal" people who may differ in choices we make when presented with the same problem. Different people will react to the same stimuli differently. Now add in factors that are considered abnormalities. Theories evolve over time as to what is the best treatment or action to be taken for a given condition.





Call it a SWAG. a Scientific Wild Ashed Guess based on quantitative data that is accurate more often than it is wrong as long as the situation has been assessed accurately. Psychology relies on a bell curve of probabilities instead of certainties in most cases.|||The study of psychology is a mixture of art and science. People who pretend it's hard science (ie behaviorists) are kidding themselves. You just can't slice up people's brains and experiment on them the way you can with certain animals, and all results are subject to interpretation--in other words, guesswork. Psychologist attempt to define undefinable terms and do their very best to quantify them. The research findings are useful and help a lot of people--but the attitude that behavior can be quantified and scientifically controlled is not. People are a lot more complex than the molecules that make them up.|||I believe its a point made for why it was once not recognised as a science, i think some ppl still debate it.





Nothing in psychology is proven, its supported. Thats all.





but its not geuss work, psychology is an academic and applied discipline which involves the scientific study of human (or animal) mental functions and behaviors.





give it more credit than "geuss work"|||I believe that most of psychology is guess work. How could you prove most of it? Unless you take the BF Skinner work/approach and actually look at behavior... there is no way to prove what someone is like or what they are thinking.





however, most things in life are just theory. Use your own brain and common sense to see if what you read makes sense.