Psychology likes to tell the story of its scientific origins through the laboratory, especially Wundt’s laboratory in Leipzig in 1879. But there is a curious irony here: in many psychology degrees, laboratory training is now marginal or practically nonexistent.
Students learn statistics, research methods, and experimental design. But that is not the same as learning how to do experimental science. Spending time in a laboratory, setting up procedures, working with equipment, collecting behavioural data, dealing with failures, refining protocols, and learning in practice what it means to measure a variable are experiences of a different kind.
There is, then, something strange about a discipline that invokes the laboratory as part of its scientific identity while doing relatively little to train its students to work in one.
How many psychology degrees in Portugal actually provide sustained training in experimental laboratory work?