Psychology can predict human behaviors

The argument

Through experience, experimentation, and observation, psychologists can predict human behaviors much in the same way that scientists in other fields can predict outcomes based on their findings. The comparison is the argument's entire structure. Rather than asking whether psychology resembles the older sciences in its subject matter, it asks whether it does the thing that makes a field scientific, which is taken to be the production of reliable predictions from accumulated findings. Knowledge about human behavior is based on general experience. A psychologist can recall memories and events from their own interactions with other people, and use the information to predict behaviors in patients and test subjects. They can also simply "people watch" to observe people in everyday situations. Observation of this kind is presented as data collection rather than as casual impression, and it is the same starting point other sciences work from: a record of what happens under ordinary conditions, gathered before anything has been manipulated. Psychologists devise experiments to observe how people react to a given situation. The outcomes of these experiments can inform psychologists of behavioral patterns. This is the step separating the discipline from observation alone. An experiment fixes the conditions so that responses can be compared against one another, which is what allows a pattern to be distinguished from a coincidence in a way that watching by itself cannot. These findings can be used to predict human behaviors in the same or similar situations. Prediction closes the loop, because it exposes the pattern to a test it could fail — a claim about how people will behave in a specified situation can be checked against how they actually do behave, and revised when it turns out to be wrong. Psychology is therefore a science because the body of knowledge it builds can be used to predict human behaviors. On this account the label follows from the method rather than from the subject, so the difficulty of studying people is a fact about the field's working conditions rather than an objection to its standing.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Although valuable insights can be gleaned from observing people, the findings are unreliable at best due to humans' unpredictable nature. A psychologist can make general assumptions about how a person might react in a given situation, but there is no guarantee that every person will react in the same way. Observing people through controlled experiments is also unreliable, because it would be difficult to replicate the ideal setting and situation of an experiment out in the real world, and vice versa. A person might behave differently during an experiment in which they are being observed as opposed to facing the same situation in real life. These findings are not very useful in predicting human behaviors. Psychology can't be considered a science if its entire base of knowledge is muddled with such inconsistencies.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Psychology can't be considered a science because its body of knowledge is unreliable at making accurate predictions about human behavior.