I studied cognition and came to the very same, sad conclusion. There’s a reason there was a reproduction crisis and it’s far from over. I remember vividly how one of my professors, during a paper debate, would end criticism with: “but it’s been published” as if that handwavy gesture could explain away serious research gaps that even graduate students saw through right away. Shoddy statistics in a system that rewards quantity can do a lot of damage.
So it's science inasmuch as anything with n=1 repeatability can be science
It may have to do with the overall complexity being easier to effectively model. Psychology has such big error terms that you either give up or get comfortable with a lot of hand-waving and dogma. A huge proportion of psychologists are just activists and have no real interest in being scientists (beyond the prestige).
Do they believe it's a science? Assume that Upton Sinclair's famous quote applies.
Eco: house, household, or dwelling place.
The -logy suffix is 'science'. So ecology is: the scientific study of how living organisms interact with one another and with their physical surroundings.
The -nomy suffix is a field or system of something.
Economy is the ecology of finance. Or, Economy is a field of science that predicts financial systems. Any scientific field helps you make predictions, once you know the material. But useful predictions require useful measurement.
Logos in particular is my favorite word. The logy suffix derives from it, and one approximation is "thoughts" or you might also see "word". The Bible begins with "In the beginning there was the Logos". We translate that as "Word", even though the connotation is also "thoughts". It might be more accurately understood as "the patterns, rules, logic of the universe". For the Greeks, thought was not something one "had", in the same sense we think, but rather something innate in nature that one participated in.
So the Bible verse might be better understood as "in the beginning there was the same working logic in the universe that we observe and participate in now, the same innate rules governed the cosmos that do now". That's actually a much more useful and honest interpretation than "in the beginning was God's words".
When one studies their particular -logy, biology, ecology, etc, they are not just looking at things describing them, they are more intrinsically bound up in a truth discovery exercise about something whose patterns and working can be figured out.
Natural Science could be conceptualized as a logology - literally studying how the Logos works in its various dimensions.