There's a fringe group in mainstream psychology and a minority group in clinical psychology that suggest empiricism isn't relevant to the human mind. Behaviorism, cognitive psychology, and neurology are to date the only areas of psychology with empirical aspects, and (unless you're asking a behaviorist, cognitive scientist, or neurologist), their scope is limited to simple behaviors and the limits of biology.
As Albert Bandura points out:
In the bidirectional view, evolutionary pressures fostered changes in biological structures for the use of tools, which enabled an organism to manipulate, alter, and construct new environmental conditions. Environmental innovations of increasing complexity, in turn, created new selection pressure for the evolution of specialized biological systems for functional consciousness, thought, language, and symbolic communication.
Human evolution provides bodily structures and biological potentialities, not behavioral dictates. Having evolved, the advanced biological capacities can be used to created diverse cultures - aggressive, pacific, egalitarian, or autocratic ones.
We need to remember those things as we go steaming ahead into an era of biological psychology. Psychoanalysis, which actually has some support despite being completely unverifiable in nature, is out of favor mostly because of politics but also because it can't be scientifically supported or have relevant outcome studies.
And why are those important? Insurance companies.
Cognitive therapies are great for that reason, cause insurance companies like them and they ARE based on actual evidence for success. But cognitive don't work on things that existential therapies work for, and existential therapies have absolutely no valid outcome studies whatsoever (how can you study the outcome of something that's based on the patient's feelings?).
And then you have the philosophical roots to psychology that some argue are far more valid than science-based approaches.
All that to say, there's a very delicate balance to be had in psychology between philosophy and science. Philosophy is the strongest of all foundations to psychology, but when the approaches aren't scientific we end up with insulin shock therapies and attaching car batteries to schizophrenics and all sorts of un-fun things. But in the opposite direction, science caused unethical experiments that have been a blemish on psychology as a discipline for decades. My boyfriend was suicidal from a relapse of depression and was scared he'd be taken to a mental facility and given old-school shock therapy and tied into a straight jacket. In 2015, I'm explaining to someone that we've changed since the 40s. And yet when I explain to him the importance of science to psychology, science also caused Little Albert to be tortured, led to Abu Ghraib circa 1970 in the Stanford Basement, and Milgram showing that people will shock a person to death just because a researcher says they should.
That's a bit of a pseudo-relevant rant, but all that to say, yes, there's a lot of suspended disbelief involved in psychological research. As nice as it would be, this isn't a truly natural science. There isn't a rock we can put under a microscope or blood we can run a chemical test on or a physics test we can do out back of the research lab. These are barely-describable concepts that we're hanging on a hope and a dream of being statistically relevant, which is an arbitrary concept.
People who trust psychological research aren't very informed about the nature of psychological research lol
