Disagreement In Psychology: The Causes Of Differences In Natural Sciences And Psychology

Facts are defined as a true knowledge component. Disagreement, however, would be the lack of consensus or correspondence. If experts in a discipline are exposed to the same true facts, then how and why does disagreement occur? By relying on the areas of knowledge of natural sciences and psychology, the answer to that question will be examined. These two cases give different perspective to that controversy considering that disagreement in natural sciences is negatively viewed as a fallacy since facts in this areas are thought to be either right or wrong and contradictions could lead to a loss of faith in science. In contrast, to disagreements in psychology are viewed as different valid interpretations giving us a better insight on a specific

How reliable is one’s observation to determine facts? In the area of natural sciences, precision is very important. For example, on a physics experiment that I had to make, I had the task to measure a specific distance in my multiple trials. As I measured again and again, I kept getting around the same results which is supposed to be a good sign of precision. However, when I compared my results to one of my peers, we had a really big gap between our numbers despite the fact that we had used the same instrument, the same equations and the same context. I was able to deduce later on that my very precise facts were not accurate since hadn’t seen that the instrument we used starts the first unit of measure a centimetre after its end, which had completely altered my final results. Many people fail to pay attention to the difference between precise and accurate since precise results aren’t always valid. In psychology, the difficulty of operationalizing qualitative variables plays an important role in the interpretation of results. An example would be determining happiness. Since different people showcase emotions in different ways, to be able to interpret them can be really complex. Many approaches to be able to measure certain emotions have been established but can lead to different results. A first approach could be by observing physical effects of happiness such as current technology have been trying to study through facial features, polling certain people that would have a questionnaire examining the person’s satisfaction relating to possible sources of happiness, creating scales of happiness, etc… However, people’s interpretation of happiness would affect the interpretation of the results which would cause concerns in deduced