Undergraduates' Perceptions Towards Psychology As A Science: Differentiating Explicit Responses From Implicit Associations

Abstract

Research has primarily adopted explicit measures to examine students' view about the scientific status of psychology (Friedrich, 1996). Such measures have been found to be influenced by social desirability characteristics, however (Bartels et al., 2009). Moreover, explicit measures that are more direct by nature tend to yield less favorable and less scientific attitudes towards psychology compared to less direct ones (Hartwig & Delin, 2003; Osborn et al., 2003;Provost et al., 2011;Webb, 1988). In this experiment, a go/no-go LDT was administered to both introduction to psychology students and upper year psychology majors to explore participants' scientific attitudes towards psychology at an implicit level (Perea, Rosa, & Gomez, 2002). Using this procedure, psychology's implicit associations with "science", methodological terminology, as well as scientific and psychological attributes were assessed. The data showed that implicit "science-psychology" associations increase with greater exposure to the psychological curriculum. Furthermore, implicit associations between "psychology" and methodological terminology similarly strengthened over time. These results suggest that students' propensity associate psychology with science after obtaining greater psychology-specific education can be observed at a more basic level of processing.