From time to time, people ask the question: is psychology a science? They might assume that psychology is just a bunch of individuals who talk about their feelings all the time. They may even claim that psychology is the study of the mind. However, psychology is not phrenology which focuses on detecting skull bumps to determine the personality of the person. Phrenology is also a pseudoscience in which psychology has no part. Pseudoscience may look like science, but it lacks some key factors necessary for scientific research. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Another example of pseudoscience next to phrenology is astrology. When people look at their horoscopes, they might think there is science behind it. However, horoscopes are vague and they are designed that way so that they can apply to everyone. Psychology, on the other hand, has a scientific basis. Psychology uses the empiricist approach which obtains information from direct observation (Gratter & Forzano, 2009) and uses all steps of the scientific method. The steps in the scientific method include asking a question, doing background research, forming a hypothesis, testing your hypothesis by doing an experiment, and finally analyzing your data and drawing a conclusion then reporting the results. If they did not follow the scientific method, psychological experiments such as the one at Stanford Prison would likely not exist alongside other experiments and discoveries made today about human behavior. The Stanford Prison Experiment took place when a man named Philip Zimbardo wanted to study reports of brutality among American prison guards. (McLeod, 2009) Even though his experiment was unethical, through his experiment we learned that when people are given too much power, they end up becoming sadistic tyrants. Zimbardo had to follow all the steps of the scientific method to acquire this information he learned about what people do when they have too much power. Science is about understanding the world we live in and using that information to eventually make the world a better place. This is what psychology also tries to do: it sets out to explain, predict, describe and possibly change. People who believe that psychology is not a science know very little or nothing about it. Not only is psychology considered a true science because of its methodology, but other factors that make psychology scientific are the brilliant researchers/founders of psychology. Psychology is a sister of philosophy. Therefore, psychology has been influenced by Greeks like Socrates or Aristotle (McLeod, 2011). However, psychology and philosophy are not the same fields; psychology is designed to study human behavior and why humans behave the way they do, and philosophy examines how people relate to knowledge. Psychology was part of the philosophy branch until the 1870s ("History of Psychology", n.d.) when the father of psychology Wilhelm Wundt opened the first experimental laboratory dedicated to psychology in 1879 in Germany. Wundt analyzed the human mind in a different way than philosophy. In doing so, he separated psychology from philosophy by proposing ideas such as introspection and structuralism. (“Discover the.