We could turn this into an empirical question. The following article (abstract from PsychInfo) might be of interest: Title:Psychology's Status as a Scientific Discipline: Its Empirical Placement Within an Implicit Hierarchy of the Sciences. Author:Simonton, Dean Keith Author Affiliation:Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, US. Author e-mail: dksimon...@ucdavis.edu Author Address:Simonton, Dean Keith, Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, CA, dksimon...@ucdavis.edu Appears In: Review of General Psychology. Vol 8(1), Mar 2004, 59-67. Publisher Info: Educational Publishing Foundation, US. 2004. DOI: 10.1037/1089-2680.8.1.59 Abstract: Psychology's standing within a hypothesized hierarchy of the sciences was assessed in a 2-part analysis. First, an internally consistent composite measure was constructed from 7 primary indicators of scientific status (theories-to-laws ratio,consultation rate, obsolescence rate, graph prominence, early impact rate, peer evaluation consensus, and citation concentration). Second, this composite measure was validated through 5 secondary indicators (lecture disfluency, citation immediacy,anticipation frequency, age at receipt of Nobel Prize, and rated disciplinary hardness). Analyses showed that the measures reflected a single dimension on which 5 disciplines could be reliably ranked in the following order: physics, chemistry, biology,psychology, and sociology. Significantly, psychology placed much closer to biology than to sociology, forming a pair of life sciences clearly separated from the other sciences.
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