Learn from the mistakes of others

I agree with most of what you're saying here. But. I'd have to say that psychology as a discipline isn't quite as bad as all that. I'm currently employed disseminating the received wisdom to first years, so I do have (I hope)a reasonable idea of what Adelaide uni's psych department teaches. So I'll mount a defense!

There's certainly no one in the department I'm in announcing that they've "proven" anything (unless you count my damn students) As a discipline most psych research I've seen follows the scientific TM way of proposing hypotheses and then doing experiments which either support or fail to support them.

There is widespread misuse of statistics, especially null hypothesis significance testing, but there are also many psych researchers who really know their statistical stuff. Some of them also have Maths degrees. Regardless, I think psychologists in general should consult statisticians when doing research, rather than relying on what is often pretty amateur knowledge.

As for "discovering" basic behaviours, if you're talking about the tendancy for psychologists to do experiments and find the obvious, I think that too is a criticism leveled too often. "Common wisdom" and "the obvious" are not always correct - it is the scientific TM way of doing things that tells us to check to see how things really are. When a piece of research runs counter to the obvious, it seems valid, yet when it simply confirms the obvious it seems pointless. I think we need to confirm the obvious, just to make sure it is actually so. Sometimes it isn't.

Anyway, when it comes to the anti-quantitative methods people, some of their conmplaints are very valid. It is an unavoidable fact that many areas psychologists would like to examine are almost impossible to measure with highly rigorous scientific methods. As a reaction to psychoanalysis (Freud etc.), the discipline went through this phase mid last century of only measuring behaviour - after all, you can't really know what's going on in someone's head, right? Sadly, that excludes one of the main points of psychology, which is working out how people think. Since then people have used the computer as a model for the human mind, in order to develope theories about how it works, but there's still a lot of contention over what can and can't be studied. And there's still a tendancy to reduce very complex things to simple questionnaires in order to create something that can be measured statistically. So, lots of people complain about this from within the discipline, and this drives the move away from quantitative methods.

But, as I said before, sometimes these guys throw the baby out with the bath water.

Personally, I believe that which method is best depends on what you are studying. There's nothing to say you can't combine methods (though many purists of either school go nuts over this) and augment concrete statistical analyses with in depth interviews or what have you. (Not that these things can't be done scientifically) I think in a discipline like psych you need both. I actually think it is quite accurate to call psychology a pseudo-science, and that that is what it should be.

Of course, some post-modernism/sociology inspired parts of psychology do rather wander away whistling when it comes to actually going out and looking at the world. They have their 3 subjects, and their TV show, and they don't need anything else, thankyou very much! Others from this same area have very cogent things to say about how little most psychologists recognise the biases inherrent in their research. They are often, IMO, correct. But just because some people do a certain type of research badly doesn't mean you should abandon the whole thing...

Anyway, sorry for the gigantic rant. I think my point is that it's easy to overstate the problems in psychology. They exist, but they're not as bad, or ubiquitous as many people might think. Besides, I've spent...7 years (Gah!)...of my life involved with this discipline, so I figure I should be willing to defend it! LOL.