Is Psychology Commonsense or a Real Science?

Psychology is a scientific study of mental processes and behavior. The term mental process means an individual’s thoughts and feelings that cannot be directly observed and behavior refers to any observed action made by an individual or animal. Psychology employs various scientific methods in studying behavior and in finding the answers to questions because human intuition and everyday reasoning is not enough to critically analyze human nature therefore psychology is more than just commonsense.
Scientific method is a systematic approach to conducting research which includes designing controlled experiments, gathering data, developing, testing and evaluating hypothesis and then drawing conclusions. Psychologists use the same methods in their research as used in natural sciences. One of the research methods used in psychology is controlled experiment which is conducted in a laboratory under controlled conditions to evaluate change in behavior with respect to change in environment by controlling one or more variables of environment and studying the response of the subject with the changes in those controlled variables. The measurements, experimenters use to evaluate behavior include reaction time and various psychometric measurements. This method of research is based completely on the scientific method to study the behavior and often used in cognitive and biological psychology.
Another scientific research method used in various areas of psychology is computational modeling in which computers are used to simulate a particular behavior since computers process the data extremely quickly and with accuracy. Computational modeling is a method of simulating real life situations with mathematical and statistical equations to forecast their future behavior by using tools as queuing theory, decision theory and linear programming. Psychologists benefit from this synthetic method by being more explicit about the details of their hypothesis as computer programming languages are free form vagueness and ambiguity. This method is also used in various other areas of science.
Other methods used in psychology research include both experimental and non experimental methods such as personal interviews, surveys and polling, microanalysis and naturalistic and clinical observations. Experimental methods are those in which variables are manipulated to discover cause and effect of the behavior whereas non experimental methods are observational and include correlation studies of variables. Some people may argue that observational research involves data collection and analysis therefore it is non experimental and non scientific but processing large amounts of correlation data can make predictions that can not be made by everyday reasoning.
The judgments we make about behavior, intentions and motivations of others based on our reasoning are subjective that may be biased while psychologists use the systematic and objective scientific methods to reach the conclusions. Psychologists tend to be skeptical and curious so they use critical thinking in their research. Critical thinking refers to evaluation of evidence, assessment of conclusions and development of scientific and intellectual tools to prove their claims. Even sometimes psychological research may conclude results that may contradict commonsense or everyday reasoning because such conclusions or claims are derived from experiments and research through scientific methods rather than intuition (Dewey, 2007).

References
Dewey, R.A. (2007). Psychology: An Introduction. Retrieved July 24, 2009,
from http://www.intropsych.com/index.html