I think society in general passes judgement on Psychology majors and the Social Sciences in general because you are not guaranteed a high salary when you graduate.
Psychology in particular has a serious problem with it's acceptance of pseudoscience as a valid part of the field. At least for me, that's where judgement gets passed.
Therapists are accepting of pseduoscience, which goes back all the way to Freud. Academic in Psychology do not accept pseduoscience. We tend to be very sensitive to this concept because we realize that it hurts our field.
When I was a graduate student in my Ph.D. program, the Psychology program got a brand new building because we brought in the most amount of research dollars than any other field. People in the "hard" sciences were upset and would say very untrue things about psychology and how it's not a real science. The president replied, "If you want a new building, be like the Psychology program and bring in more money."
My first degree is in research psychology from the early 2000s, and yep, it was *staunchly* scientific with an obsessive commitment to ultra controlled RCTs, to the point of hurting the their ability to interpret data. Thankfully more flexible qualitative methods have become accepted, which is helping provide much more context to the findings of psych RCTs and making them more applicable and useful.
This isn't just psych though, it's happening in all research that is relevant to human health, because RCTs are painfully limited when applying their findings to actual, complex systems like human beings who don't exist in RCT conditions. Qualitative research is actually becoming critical in medicine.
My most recent degree is in counselling psychology, which isn't so much pseudoscience as it is philosophy, which is a very important distinction.
Psychology as a research discipline grew out of psychoanalytic theories, which weren't scientific to begin with, so psych research epically shit on its own beginnings to differentiate itself from it's founding field. This was because of academic politics, not actual need. Many early psychoanalytic philosophers were medical doctors and perfectly comfortable with the need for scientific analysis of the field.
This tension between philosophy and science is historical and silly. You don't need to reject philosophy in order to be scientific.
However, to categorize clinical psychology as "accepting of pseudoscience" is simply not accurate. Just because we study and utilize the tools created by psychological philosophers doesn't mean we "accept pseudo science."
To say this would be to say that ALL medical professionals "accept pseudo science." Because my previous are of expertise was a "hard medicine" area where I worked purely in the realm of treating clearly identifiable physiological health problems with drugs and cutting.
And yet, in most medicine, our treatments are based on just as much historical clinical practice as psychotherapy is. Many of our treatments in medicine, dentistry, PT, RMT, etc, etc were not developed out of RCTs, they were developed out of clinical ideas and trial and error.
This is *exactly* how psychotherapy has been developed.
Clinicians have ideas, they know some of the relevant science, but nowhere near all of it, and they try shit out and see if it works. Just like in psychotherapy, most of the RCTs of treatment effectiveness occur AFTER the treatment was developed and has been circulated within the profession. Not before.
Likewise, we've been RCTing psychotherapeutic interventions for many, many decades and always generally coming up with the same results: they all pretty much work. This is actually MUCH better scientific evidence than every single "hard" medical treatment I've personally had in the last 3 years and that's A LOT of medical treatments. My main treatment right now has ZERO scientific evidence, but is becoming very respected in orthopedic and sports medicine, because it's low risk and sometimes it works. That's often the best you can get in medicine.
Dentists don't even have a single RCT supporting that flossing is important. Hell, I don't think dentists even have a single RCT supporting the benefit of doing fillings. Does that mean they are "accepting of pseudoscience?"
This is the same lack of RCTs supporting most of our treatment of infections. Why? Because we know from clinical experience that infections kill, and it would never be ethical to run RCTs where you just let infections kill people to prove that treating infections actually works.
Most medicine is founded in clinical knowledge, not RCT knowledge, and it's the exact same for clinical psychology.
Clinical psychology works, we know this from research psych RCTs. It works in general, pretty much regardless of the intervention, but definitely correlates with the level of expertise of the counsellor. We don't know how it works, or really why, we just know it works.
This is similar to much of medicine. We don't know how or why so, so much of it works, but we know it works...sometimes...for some people, but we usually can't predict who or how much.
If anything, clinically psychology is actually *more* scientifically defensible than A LOT of medicine.
I'm about to let a surgeon break my legs and he has no RCT defense to back up that this treatment works. None whatsoever, just clinical knowledge and experience. My psychologist has the exact same type of clinical knowledge and experience backing up her interventions with me.
I can only hope and pray that my surgeon is as effective as my psychologist.
