What is the study of Psychology, and is it comparable to a hard science?

Psychology is the scientific study of the human mind and its functions. Psychology is a broad discipline that covers a number of topics, such as memory, personality, child development, mental illness and social relationships many of which you will study at A level. Debate exists over whether Psychology is classified as a science or not. Similar to the 'hard'sciences, psychology involves the construction of theories, the testing of hypotheses, and data analysis called the scientific process. However despite having a scientific methodology worked out, there are further problems and arguments which throw doubt onto psychology ever really being a science. Limitations may refer to the subject matter (e.g. overt behaviour versus subjective, private experience), objectivity, generality, testability, ecological validity, ethical issues and philosophical debates etc. Science assumes that there are laws of human behaviour that apply to each person. Therefore science takes both a deterministic and reductionist approach.In addition objectivity is impossible. It is a huge problem in psychology, as it involves humans studying humans, and it is very difficult to study the behaviour of people in an unbiased fashion.

Psychology has been defined as a pre-science as it has several paradigms (e.g. models – theories e.g. biological, social, cognitive). However we can argue that human cognition and behaviour is a result of several different paradigms within psychology, it is not the case that we have any universal laws of human behaviour. In addition many areas of psychology are not falsifiable, and certain areas e.g. memory are difficult in terms of testability i.e. they are not observable.

The debate is still ongoing, but the way I see it, Psychology is a type of science in its own discipline. It is absurd to compare humans to atoms for example. The human mind does not work in a systematic and logical way like chemical materials. This is what makes the study of psychology so interesting, and also very complex; we need to keep trying to develop scientific methods that are suitable to studying human behaviour - it may be that the methods adopted by the natural sciences are not appropriate for us.