[capnorange]

Psychology is probabilistic science, that's the best we can do given the complexities of the mind. If you want to get a taste of rigor in psychology I suggest you read some of the works by Carl Jung.

Agreed, most people looking to understand the psyche would be better off reading literature / art.

[luffapi]

Carl Jung while interesting is anything but rigorous science. Like I said, treat this stuff like fiction. Some can even be insightful!

> Psychology is probabilistic science

It’s not science if it doesn’t include reproducibility.

[evilsetg]

If the probabilities are reproducible it is still science I would say. Take quantum mechanics for example. It can not predict what exactly is going to happen, only how likely each outcome would be.

[C-x_C-f]

> It can not predict what exactly is going to happen, only how likely each outcome would be.

Yeah but the key difference is that QM is a mathematically solid theory starting from a couple basic laws to yield predictions with p-values of 0 (for all intents and purposes anyway). Also note that there are non-probabilistic measurements in QM, be they measurements of aggregate behavior or just pure states [1]. In that respect, QM and most physical sciences really are miles ahead of psychology (though I don't think that's reason to discredit the latter, as it has obvious empirical merit).

If I may be a bit bolder still, I'd argue that it's not merely a quantitative difference. As pointed out by many other comments, psychology completely lacks any sort of unifying framework, except perhaps for small clusters of thematically similar phenomena. A collection of empirical facts does not a scientific theory make, or--taken to the cheeky extreme--"All science is either physics or stamp collecting" [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_state#Pure_states

[2] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ernest_Rutherford#Quotes