"Real Science, Real Data"

        I still remember the first day of Psych 100 - the intro-level psychology class that almost every freshman interested in science or social science ends up taking - and how strongly the professor teaching the course emphasized how, well, psychology was a real science that uses real data. It was as if any advances made without adhering to real science and using real data were somehow less valid or less meaningful. One of my favorite quotes on this subject is, "The plural of anecdote is not data." I found the insistence humorous in a way, since I feel like psychology deals so much in the unquantifiable subjective - or at least, it used to. Maybe it's moved away from that since the time of Freud. How can you plot a psychoanalysis session as a data point, anyways? Even if you could (to use a rather silly example) count the number of times an individual mentions a phallic object rockets while sitting on the leather couch, what would the resulting number even represent?
       Don't get me wrong, I love data and the statistics applied towards understanding them. I just don't think it's the only way to discover the truth about the world. This is why I like anthropology so much - it's so broad that it includes a lot of both. I can be in one anthro class learning about the encephalization quotient of humans or how the Fst values for humanity show that race has no biological basis, and then go to another class to read stories about how social pressures in the 1950s made women especially susceptible to "madness". Should anthropology be considered a social science? I don't know. Does it even matter?