Scientific Inquiry and Its Alternatives, Explained

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Scientific Inquiry and Its Alternatives

Research Methods in Psychology · Chapter 1: Foundations of Psychological ResearchSection 1.2 · lesson 2 of 9411 min · free with a free account

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In this lesson

How psychology earns the right to call itself a science.

  • Name the five defining features of scientific inquiry
  • Identify authority, tradition, intuition and anecdote as ways of knowing
  • Recognize the warning signs of pseudoscience
  • Apply five questions to any everyday claim about behavior

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Transcript

Everything said in the video, section by section (1,524 words). Read along, or search it.

Foundations of Psychological Research

Scientific Inquiry and Its Alternatives

Psychology calls itself a science. This section explains what that claim actually commits it to. Because the questions psychology asks are not unique to it. People have always wondered why others behave the way they do. Religion, folk wisdom, and philosophy asked the same questions first. What changed was not the subject matter. It was the standard of proof. By the end of this section you will name the five defining features of scientific inquiry. You will identify the main non-scientific sources of knowledge, and see where each one fails. You will recognize the warning signs of pseudoscience. And you will have five questions you can put to any claim about human behavior. Including the ones you already believe.

Two Ways Of Knowing

Older Explanations Never Went Away

Start with the history, because it explains why this section is necessary at all. Long before psychology was a formal discipline, people explained behavior anyway. Through religious doctrine, folk wisdom, philosophical reasoning, and personal observation. Scientific psychology emerged in the late nineteenth century, and those older ways of knowing did not disappear. They still shape how most people understand themselves and each other. Now, be careful with the framing here. This is not good versus bad. Intuition, lived experience, and cultural tradition all carry genuine value. They help you navigate daily life, build relationships, and act fast when careful analysis is impractical. Science earned its privileged role in psychology for one specific reason. It is uniquely designed to minimize the errors that the other ways of knowing tend to produce. So the goal is not to discard the alternatives. It is to know the limits of each.

What Makes It Science

Five Commitments, Not White Coats

Here is the first thing to unlearn. Scientific inquiry is not defined by laboratories, white coats, or complex statistics. You can have all three and still be doing something unscientific. What defines it is a set of commitments about how knowledge gets produced and evaluated. Five of them are central. Empiricism. Systematic observation. Replicability. Falsifiability. And self-correction. Notice that none of those is a piece of equipment. Each is a rule about what you are willing to accept as knowledge. We will take them one at a time. And for each one, the useful question is what error it is designed to prevent.

Evidence And Procedure

Empiricism and Systematic Observation

Empiricism first. Knowledge claims must be grounded in observable evidence. Suppose a psychologist proposes that high social media use increases loneliness. Empiricism obliges that psychologist to go and collect data. Surveys, behavioral logs, longitudinal follow-ups. And crucially, data that could undermine the claim, not only data that could support it. The opinions of authorities, however eminent, do not substitute for evidence. Systematic observation is the second commitment, and it is easy to underrate. Casual observation is unreliable, because human attention is selective and memory is reconstructive. You notice what fits, and you remember it wrong. So scientific observation follows a predetermined procedure, measures variables consistently, and records data without delay. The same standards apply to every case, including the inconvenient ones.

Doing It Again

Replicability

The third commitment is replicability. A finding is scientifically meaningful only if other researchers can obtain comparable results. Same procedure, different hands, similar outcome. This is the safeguard that separates a robust finding from a lucky one. Or from a methodological artifact that nobody noticed. Psychology has taken this far more seriously in recent years, and for a painful reason. The so-called replication crisis of the twenty tens. Many widely cited findings simply did not replicate when they were retested. With larger samples, and with stricter procedures, the effects shrank or vanished. That is why replicability is a more demanding standard now than it was thirty years ago. A single striking result is a starting point, not a conclusion.

Could It Be Wrong

Falsifiability

Falsifiability was introduced in the previous section. Here is why it does so much work. A scientific claim must specify what evidence would prove it wrong. Take the claim that introverts outperform extraverts on tasks requiring sustained concentration. That is falsifiable, because a study could easily reveal the opposite pattern. Now take a different claim. That every person has an unconscious motivation which secretly drives all behavior. What observation would count against that? It is hard to name one. Almost anything a person does can be reinterpreted to fit. And here is the misreading to avoid. Falsifiability does not mean a claim is wrong. It means the claim is testable. An unfalsifiable claim is not false. It is simply outside the reach of evidence.

Fixing Itself

Self-Correction in Action

The fifth commitment is self-correction, and it is institutional rather than personal. Peer review, replication, post-publication scrutiny, and public availability of data and methods. All of them exist to expose mistakes and refine conclusions over time. History gives a sobering example. Until the nineteen seventies, many clinicians believed that mothers caused schizophrenia in their children. Through cold or contradictory communication. The so-called schizophrenogenic mother hypothesis. Decades of empirical research eventually overturned it, including twin and adoption studies. The field moved instead to a genetic and neurodevelopmental model. Notice what that shows. A popular but unsupported claim was gradually replaced as better evidence accumulated. Individual scientists may be stubborn, and often are. But the community as a whole revises its consensus when the evidence demands it.

Other Sources

Authority and Tradition

Now turn to the alternatives, because you use them every day. Four non-scientific sources dominate everyday reasoning about behavior. The first is authority. You accept a claim because of who said it. A parent, a religious leader, a professor, a government agency. Authority is efficient, and it has to be. Nobody can personally verify every fact they use. But authorities can be wrong, biased, or speaking outside their expertise. A renowned cardiologist's opinions on parenting carry no special weight. The second source is tradition. A belief is accepted because it has endured. Sometimes that works. Folk knowledge about plant medicines has occasionally been validated by modern pharmacology. But tradition also preserved long-standing assumptions about race, gender, and mental illness. Assumptions that empirical research has since dismantled.

Other Sources

Intuition, Common Sense, Anecdote

The third and fourth sources are the hardest to give up. Intuition is rapid, non-deliberative judgment. It operates without conscious analysis. Common sense is the shared body of beliefs a culture treats as obvious. Both are genuinely useful in ordinary life, and both mislead badly in psychology. The reason is that behavior is often counter-intuitive. Common sense holds that opposites attract. Research consistently shows that similarity is the stronger predictor of attraction. But common sense also holds that birds of a feather flock together. So whatever the data turn out to show, common sense will appear to have predicted it. A rule that predicts every outcome has predicted nothing. That is exactly why science is necessary. The fourth source is personal experience, and it is vivid, emotional, and easily remembered. My uncle smoked all his life and lived to ninety-two. Powerful story. Poor guide to population-level effects.

The Dangerous Case

Pseudoscience and Its Warning Signs

Now the category this section treats as genuinely dangerous. Pseudoscience adopts the appearance of scientific authority without respecting its principles. Technical vocabulary, diagrams, citations, professional-looking publications. It is more dangerous than open non-science, because it borrows the credibility of science. Psychology is particularly vulnerable, for two reasons. Behavior is complex, and pseudoscientific therapies and personality tests can be highly profitable. Several warning signs help you identify it. Unfalsifiable claims, so vague that no result could disprove them. Reliance on anecdote, where the evidence is testimonials rather than systematic data. Absence of peer review, with findings in self-published books rather than journals. A reversed burden of proof, where skeptics must prove it wrong instead of the claimant proving it right. Plus cherry-picked evidence, and outright resistance to revision.

Placing The Line

Astrology, and Where Science Stops

Astrology illustrates several of those warning signs at once. Predictions are framed broadly enough to fit almost any outcome. That effect has a name. The Barnum effect. Supporters point to the experiences that confirmed the reading, and overlook the misses. Controlled studies that tested astrological predictions consistently fail to find effects beyond chance. And the practice continues unchanged, which is the resistance to revision showing itself. Now hold on to the careful version of the conclusion. Astrology is not harmful because it is non-scientific. It is harmful when it is mistaken for science. Because plenty of things lie outside the reach of science, quite legitimately. Ultimate meaning, moral value, aesthetic preference, personal identity. No experiment settles those. Choosing a partner or a career is properly guided by intuition and personal values. The error is applying non-scientific knowledge where evidence exists and the stakes are high.

A Habit To Build

Five Questions for Any Claim

Finally, something you can actually use. Five questions turn passive consumption of claims into active evaluation. One. What is the evidence? That separates data-based claims from opinion. Two. How was the evidence collected? That reveals systematic observation versus casual observation. Three. Could the claim be wrong? That is the test for falsifiability. Four. Has the finding been replicated? That indicates whether the result is robust. Five. Are there alternative explanations? That guards against confounds and confirmation bias. Run those five over a claim you already accept, and see what happens. Here is the sentence to keep from this whole section. Science differs from other approaches not in the questions it asks. It differs in the standards it applies when answering them.

About Research Methods in Psychology at UPI Study

Research Methods in Psychology (Psychology 111) is a self-paced online course of 94 video lessons in 16 chapters, from the scientific method and research ethics to designs, data collection, sampling, measurement, validity, experiments, descriptive statistics and hypothesis testing. It carries a NCCRS credit recommendation for 3 semester credits.

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How psychologists know what they knowResearch Methods in Psychology teaches how psychological studies are designed, run and judged: research ethics, surveys and observation, correlational and experimental designs, sampling, reliability and validity, and the statistics used to test hypotheses. It is a core course in psychology and many social-science degrees.
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Universities that work with NCCRS

Research Methods in Psychology carries a NCCRS credit recommendation. These universities work with NCCRS; some are UPI Study's signed partners. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.

Thomas Edison State UniversityThomas Edison State UniversitySigned partnerUniversity of the PeopleUniversity of the PeopleSigned partnerCharter Oak State CollegeCharter Oak State CollegeSigned partnerStrayer UniversityStrayer UniversitySigned partnerColumbia Southern UniversityColumbia Southern UniversitySigned partnerIndiana TechIndiana TechSigned partnerPenn StatePenn StateWorks with NCCRSSouthern New Hampshire UniversitySouthern New Hampshire UniversityWorks with NCCRSSUNYSUNYWorks with NCCRS +many more cooperating universitiesFind my college →

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FAQ

Questions students ask us

About Scientific Inquiry and Its Alternatives

What are the five key features of scientific inquiry in psychology?
The five central commitments are empiricism, systematic observation, replicability, falsifiability and self-correction. None of them is a piece of equipment; each is a rule about what counts as knowledge. Empiricism grounds claims in observable evidence, systematic observation follows set procedures, replicability asks whether others get comparable results, falsifiability requires a claim to be testable, and self-correction lets the scientific community revise its conclusions as evidence accumulates.
Why is common sense not enough to understand human behavior?
Common sense often contradicts itself, so it can appear to predict any outcome. It holds that opposites attract, yet also that birds of a feather flock together, and research consistently finds similarity to be the stronger predictor of attraction. Because behavior is often counter-intuitive, intuition, authority, tradition and personal experience can mislead in psychology even though they are useful in everyday life.
What are the warning signs of pseudoscience in psychology?
Pseudoscience borrows the look of science, such as technical vocabulary and citations, without following its principles. Warning signs include claims too vague to be disproved, evidence based on testimonials rather than systematic data, no peer review, a reversed burden of proof that makes skeptics disprove the claim, cherry-picked evidence and resistance to revision. Astrology shows several of these signs, including vague predictions that exploit the Barnum effect.
What does the replication crisis in psychology mean?
The replication crisis refers to the discovery, during the 2010s, that many widely cited psychology findings did not hold up when other researchers retested them. With larger samples and stricter procedures, the effects often shrank or disappeared. As a result, replicability is now treated as a more demanding standard, and a single striking result is seen as a starting point for further testing rather than a settled conclusion.

About the Research Methods in Psychology course

How many college credits is Research Methods in Psychology?
Research Methods in Psychology (Psychology 111) carries a NCCRS credit recommendation for 3 semester credits. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.
How much does Research Methods in Psychology cost and what is included?
$250, paid once, with lifetime access: all 94 video lessons, a practice quiz after each, the graded work and final exam, and an official transcript when you finish. Students who want several courses choose UPI Study PRO instead.
Which universities accept UPI Study credits?
UPI Study has signed partner agreements with universities such as Thomas Edison State University, University of the People and Charter Oak State College, and works with universities such as Penn State, SNHU and SUNY. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities. Use "Find my college" on this page to check yours.
How long does Research Methods in Psychology take?
It is self-paced with no deadlines. The 94 lessons total about 16 hours of video; most students add reading and practice time and finish in a few weeks to a few months, on their own schedule.
How are the exams done?
Quizzes and assignments are online in the course. The final exam is taken online with proctoring; a person on the UPI Study team checks assignments, usually within two days.
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