it is a positivistic science, i.e. it studies observable phenomena using the scientific method. The days of Freud and Jung where you could just smoke cigars and fart out ideas about collective unconsciousness and anal fixation are long over. Experiments are conducted, confounding variables controlled, and hypotheses (including H0) are tested. Granted, it's not as easy as in physics where you just drop a ball repeatedly and note down the results, buf it doesn't in any way make it a "softer" science. To equate psychology with self-help books is akin to equating LLMs with Markov chains.