"Social sciences are easier to learn than other sciences, law, or math?"?

Question

Someone in this forum stated that he believes that social sciences like psychology or sociology are "easier" to learn than other sciences. Is this why it takes a so long to become a clinical psychologist? (This person also stated that women gravitate toward social sciences because these are "softer" courses, and that men gravitate toward other sciences and math.)

What do you think?

I am studying toward a degree in psychology right now, and I wouldn't call the subject matter "easy" to learn. I'm doing very well in these classes, but it does take hard work. I've also done well in law, and math, and biology....but I realize that people have different aptitudes for different subjects. What I reject is the notion that social sciences are, in general, "easier" subjects to learn. What do you think?

For me, subjective material is not as easy to learn. With math, I learn a formula: I got it. It's cut and dry. With psychology, there are numerous theories, hypotheses, questions, dimensions to questions, etc...it may be more subjective, but the subjectiveness does not make it any easier...and as far as psych tests go, I have yet to be able to "fake" a good answer or a good test score. My professor is far too intelligent to allow that.

Oh and I forgot to mention, in order to gain a proper education in psychology, you also must understand physiology, pharmecology, brain chemistry...to become a psychiatrist you must also become a medical doctor. So psychology really does encompass more than just the study of human behavior. You must have an understanding of how the body works, esp. the brain and nervous system, and the effects of drugs and medical conditions on the body. So it's NOT "all subjective" stuff here....

Answer 1

The problem for society has never been about how well we learn quantitative subjects. We have ALWAYS found quantitative subjects such as math and chemistry much easier to learn than subjective qualitative subjects such as philosophy and psychology and law. It is MUCH easier to measure a rock objectively than it is to subjectively assign meaning to it. The truth in that is in how much more advanced our technologies are than are our comprehension and applications of learning theories and how prevalent mental disease is, and our use of war to resolve conflicts or to plunder, as examples. In truth, the eternal problem for society is how far behind the frontiers of qualitative studies lag behind quantitative studies and thus also our wisdom to interpret and derive meaning from quantitative observations of nature. Society would be served better not so much by slowing down the advancement of technology, but rather by speeding up the advancement of social sciences and the maturity of our social conscience and validity of meanings and the processes for forming more objective comprehensions about what is truly "good" and healthy. Certainly, one significant reason for how advanced we are quantitatively and for how relatively primitive we are qualitatively is that qualitative studies are more difficult to learn.

Also, math and chemistry and geology and such quantitative studies have been powerful tools throughout history that rulers and elites have horded and wielded for their own benefit. Math, weaponry, chemistry and other sciences, even music, have typically been highly guarded "state" secrets kept among men who rose in power into patriarchal worlds dominated by such men of "power" and politics. Much of the Masons is about ensuring the protection and transfer of geometry and other math among common men, knowledge that was once kept from common men. And, there has always been a deliberate ignorance impose on general populations to prevent them from rising, from being able to think for themselves critically enough to problem-solve or comprehend freedom and democracy and human rights. Always, the frontiers of quantitative inquiry were kept from the masses, as they are even today.

But, every village in the world had a church or temple and a holy book with qualitative teachings about conscience and comprehension of the human condition and how people should get along, about marriage and parenting and birth and death and madness and good and evil. While men were paid highly to ADVANCE qualitative studies for weaponry and technology, men of the cloth were rewarded to NOT advance qualitative studies, to maintain unchanging dogma and to keep the masses docile and obedient to lords and masters and rulers. Those in power today horde not only quantitative science but also qualitative science from the masses because such frontiers in qualitative science can be used as weaponry, such as psychological warfare and profiling, and owned by commercial interests, such as Madison Avenue advertising, and such as the research being conducted on Yahoo Answers as mentioned in our agreement with them.

Until only this last century, women were rarely allowed near that heady frontier of such powerful knowledge. Certainly, by not being allowed access to education, patents or funding, women were locked out of many fields and certainly locked out of "frontier" research due to the power issues among the most power-seeking of all men who locked out all but a few "players" of even their own gender. Then, right after WWII in some regards . . .earlier actually in other regards . . . essentially all control of quantitative scientific frontier research got taken away from scientists and researchers and now governmental agencies such as the National Institute of Health and CDC and private industry call all the shots. With contractual agreements, they hire the best minds they can find, pay them well and own all their intellectual property thereafter. In this new environment, women are highly welcomed, are not locked out or hobbled by "good old boy" systems, and are thus excelling in every field. Culturally, women need about two more generations to shake off the shackles and self-doubts and residual discriminations caused by tens of thousands of years of second-class citizenship and lack of access to education and equal opportunity before they will surely begin to "dominate" all quantitative fields, per an Air Force study I read recently.

Because our application of the primitive learning theories that we have are primitive in themselves and because women have been getting advanced degrees enmass for ONLY two or three generations and because women are still being smacked around and damaged from birth with negative cultural messages that interfer with their full potentiation, it's anyone guess at this time about what our true apptitudes and potentials are, about what ANY of us really can and cannot learn well. My guess is that everyone, male and female, with better primary educational approaches, will increasingly gravitate more closely to fields that match their learning styles, which are not gender based.
http://www.ldrc.ca/projects/miinventory/miinventory.php?eightstyles=1

Answer 2

Social sciences in general require more memorization which is certainly not everyone's cup of tea.

Meanwhile, physical sciences often involve concepts very difficult to master and intuit, again the stuff of nightmares for many people.

I am a successful phycisist, but I could NEVER be a good biologist or psychologist. I've seen the thick thousand page paperbacks and would rather take my own wisdom teeth out without anestaesia than slog through THAT.

BTW, I have close friends in psychology and there is a LOT of gunk in psychology that seriously needs to be taken care of. You guys really need to go back to being a real SCIENCE!

Answer 3

People who apply math and science to economics and recognize patterns will benefit. Economics is very socially intensive, however. Politics and economics are more closely related than other sciences; that is, unless something receives public attention- like say global warming, over fishing, mountain top removal, etc... Even when the public follows the media on earth science issues, social science is still not nearly taken into consideration as technical solutions in resolving those conflicts.

Answer 4

I don't believe that the "social sciences" are less difficult than the more solid sciences like maths or physics but they do require attitudes and aptitudes totally different. Thinking "ouside the box", one could say that apart from the areas where there is overlap with things such as medicine or bio-chemistry the social sciences are not really sciences at all.

Answer 5

I find social sciences generally easier to learn, at least to the BS level. There seems to be two separate kinds of memory involved. I cruised clear through high school and partway through college the first time based on the first kind of memory. My memory is not exactly eidetic but it stores an integrated view of anything I read so in any of the "fuzzier" sciences I can read the literature once and then usually get a passing score on most tests with no further studying required. I ran into trouble on the "hard" sciences when they got complicated enough to require exact memory ot the formulas and facts as well as comprehension and belief in the material from the courses from previous years. I gave up when my GPA hit 1.6 and I couldn't solve the problems even when I wanted to. I found a secure job and spent years recovering and learning how to learn. I went back to school just about twenty years later, while still working my secure job, and got a BS Natural Sciences / Math. Never got less than a 4.0 in any of the classes. The young kids hated me, but I tried to show those who were interested how do it.
Some thoughts:
The higher level courses you describe, a few of which I think I took, are not "fuzzy" and require more rigorous study techniques.
I have noticed that how well I can access specific details tends to depend on if I am in the SAME mood as I was when I first learned them. In other words, material learned when I am angry can often only be recalled when I am angry again.
I am SciFi trained and tend to be a Fortian. It ain't 93 million miles to the Sun until I have chained the distance myself. Until then, I accept the data as a hypothesis but have trouble recalling the exact details as they are still unproven. This is what I ran into trouble with. My original major was engineering. I still fiddle with aeronautical engineering / structural for the fun of it, but until recently, most of the experiments I ran were actually of the Fortian variey, merely verifying for myself the formulas and facts.
I grew up in the Vietnam era. We were lied to so much that anything ANYBODY in any position of authority said was treated as a probable lie and suspect. This included my teachers in the technical subjects.
Modern pyschology still has some built in cultural biases that hinder the understanding of human nature. The quick test I run is to think of what I know from other cultures and situations and see if different results pop up. I suspect this is related to the current rift between Liberals, Conservatives and Goldwater Conservatives in the USA. A survey of where they are living and what they are doing to stay alive and work might show an extremely interesting pattern. For instance, the Minnesota Multiphasic ?Personality? test was calibrated on professors and college students. Giving it to workers in heavy industries and Marines fresh out of combat would, I believe, give entirely different results. Basically, people who have seen and had to deal with severe injuries and death out in the world, not in a hospital setting have a different view of the world.

Answer 6

I have a degree in Psychology myself. And, the problem with the "Soft" Sciences is that they can be harder or easier than the "Hard" Sciences, depending on your degree of integrity--because they ARE subjective. Controls have to be a lot more rigourous. If your measurements are good, chemical reactions always come down the same way. Psych experiments produce a lot of different results and all you get is a level of probability. If you are lazy or grinding an ax, you can make the results be anything you want. If you are honest, and most importantly, honest with yourself, results that can be trusted are going to require a lot of trials and peer review.

Biology can be the same way. There are some pretty notorious studies where the data have been fudged to produce the "Right" result. Especially in the areas of smoking and illegal drugs. Too many "Scientists" are ready to proclaim that any correlation is a causlal link. For instance, just about every study on Second Hand smoke effects has been skewed in accordance with who paid for it. And, the famous study "Proving" that Hemp smoking causes chromosone breakage was performed by a man who later surrendered his Medical license after being caught falsifying lab results at his Fertility Clinic. The DEA is notorious for rewarding those who produce results, however shady that support their case and punishing those who produce results they don't want to hear.

Parapsychology is more like jackleg engineering than real Science and will be until we can establish what the hell it is we need to measure and how.

Maybe it's my own bias, but I feel that the Math used in Social and Bio Sciences is more difficult than that used in the Physical Sciences.

Answer 7

Well I just got a degree in animal science and a minor in philosophy. For my minor I had to take some upper level psychology classes..

and I'm sorry but they were no where near as difficult as the organic chemistrys and anatomy and physiologies I had.

I'm not saying a degree in the social sciences isn't as valuable

I would never be condescending about anyone's field of education,

but for me psychology was much easier than the biological sciences.

Answer 8

Are you referring to my answer? Don't want to seem paranoid. "Everything's about me!"
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AmJevWOMeEw7W2UkA1s_9_Tty6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20071117201651AAlyNSV&show=7#profile-info-MbZjypV4aa

I talked about how at A-level (British exams taken by 16-18 year-olds) the numbers taking science drops each year. It is simply a fact that it is much easier to get an "A" in business studies than it is in chemistry, and students increasingly recognise this. (I would bet good money (but don't know for sure) that it's also tougher to get a first in a pure science degree than it is in a social science) The context was this: I said that A-Level science subjects are marked according to much tougher standards. This is just true. And of course, boys gravitate towards the sciences which MUST pull down their overall mean performance. There are obviously other big reasons why girls outperform boys as I mentioned.

Anyway, aside from grading, I would certainly consider sociology to be a generally easier subject than physics. Wouldn't you? And it's true (is it not?) that a greater proportion of males take maths and science degrees, and a greater number of females take social science degrees.

A couple of points: When I referred to "soft" subjects I was actually thinking about things like media studies - should have made that clearer. However, I would still contend that social sciences are "softer" (i.e. easier) than pure sciences. I did history - an art or a social science depending on your viewpoint - so I'm not trying to put people down for no reason, I'm only stating what I think is true. And psychology is hard (isn't it considered science AND social science? - was at my old uni), harder than history - I don't dispute that.

Edit: I don't see why this is so controversial. Gnu (above) is just obviously right, and yet he's 0-2 (at the time of writing).

Edit: Yes Gnu I know, I've seen this plenty of times. A classic example is the ludicrous feminist reaction to Steven Goldberg's book "Why Men Rule: A Theory Of Male Dominance" which only stated the obvious (but brilliantly).

Answer 9

Edited to say: I also think a lot of maths, science and particularly law would be EASIER to learn because it's formulaic and relies on memory, reptition and learning lists of things more than social sciences, which require creative and often out of the box thinking about something which has defied the ability of 'hard scientists' ~ human beings.

Hey VJX, suppose you find a malnourished and dirty looking child crying in a gutter with a man bending over it telling it to be quiet and hurry up. What do you do? 1) Call the cops; 2) Smile sympathetically at him and go on your way; 3) Ask the kid how it's doing and engage it in conversation; 4) Nothing, too busy thinking about my maths question.

~*~*~

Well, they are easier for some people, and some people find them harder. Would a maths genius necessarily be able to complete a psychology course with ease?

But the real question is, are they less valuable?

I mean, for me it's way harder to learn to play the piano than to type a letter. But in my job, no-one cares about my piano playing skills.

If you're studying a 'soft science' (interesting that this term applies to the sciences that women are usually predominant in, lol), chances are your life skills, experience, empathy, common sense and ability to relate to people will all count, and that you will make a direct and tangible difference in peoples lives every day you go to work.

You might do that as (for instance) an astrologer too, I guess. I'm personally interested in astrology and find the discoveries and events of astrologists fascinating.

I'm sure that when the day comes that they warn us about the big comet coming to kill us all, I'll be glad I listen to 'Astronomy for Everyone' on the radio and have 'NASA's photo of the day' bookmarked.

How does being really good at astronomy directly and tangibly help an abused child or a hungry citizen? Well, I'm sure there's a connection, but once again, it's a question of what value you put on things, isn't it?

Cheers :-)

Answer 10

Those subjects aren't necessarily "easier" to learn. I've noticed that people who are good in subjects such as social sciences tend to have a harder time learning math. People who are good in math often have a harder time with social sciences. It has to do with a particular individual's mind and how it works. I know I could be good in math if I only tried but I really don't have any interest in it. On the other hand, social sciences do interest me a great deal and I can zip through classes without putting forth that much effort.

Answer 11

I really don't know. Yes I read it too but I don't see how anyone can say that the social sciences and liberal arts are easier to learn than math and science. I want to see some data that indicate that the learning curves are significantly different. Not someone's own opinion or prejudice.

Edit: I want to add that I'm thinking of learning not just running up a score in exams.