As a general response, I would point out that the entry requirements to study Psychology at University are lower than those of more 'hard' mathematical subjects, such as maths and physics (at least in the UK). During their period of study students also study the bare minimum number of mathematical modules (mostly statistics), therefore, you could argue they are not fully trained in 'maths'.

A completely anecdotal experience: During my undergraduate (MPhys) I lived in halls with about 20 psychologists. I remember one night during the second year (of 4) they all had a huge celebration. The reason for the celebration was that they had had their last ever maths exam of the undergraduate. I remember one girl proclaimed "Thank god, I've never have to do any maths ever again!". She was met with a roar of support... I couldn't help but cringe thinking about the necessity of statistics in their future research.

As someone who studied Psychology and CS, and is somewhat good at math, it's not necessarily a bad thing that psychology students don't take a lot of math.

I'd say maybe 10% of students who take psychology actually go on to do anything with research. Most of my friends in psychology are now counsellors, social workers, occupational therapists etc., and are good at their jobs, and this would not change if they had to take multivariate calculus.

At the same time, I do think psychological research would benefit if the people performing that research were better trained in math (actually when I say math, I specifically mean statistics and linear algebra).

I think the problem is that psychology is so broad that it can't possibly do a good job at catering to all these different concerns. Even at the graduate level, in order to become a clinical psychologist, you have to do a lot of research. The scientist-clinician model sounds good, but in practice I found that a lot of people who just didn't care about research were doing research. I found the same thing with medical students who were doing research to pad their resumes.

I also think that you can't just take a physicist or mathematician and plop them in psychology and start fixing everything. The problems often require a ton of theory, are really expensive to test, and the data quality is often terrible (because of human error, measurement error etc). Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1831/

>I would point out that the entry requirements to study Psychology at University are lower than those of more 'hard' mathematical subjects, such as maths and physics (at least in the UK)... During their period of study students also study the bare minimum number of mathematical modules (mostly statistics)

Because the math is easier, and all you need is statistics. As the article states, the problem is, it seems even that lower bar isn't being met.