Using Human Minds to Study Human Behavior
- When you observe a chemical reaction, molecules won't change their behavior because they know you're watching but humans would.
- They might act more politely, exaggerate their responses, or try to figure out what you want to hear.
- This observer effect makes human sciences fundamentally different from the natural sciences, with the deeper challenge being that humans are simultaneously the subject and object of investigation.
Definition
Human sciences
Systematic study of human behavior, societies, and mental processes using empirical methods adapted to account for the complexity, variability, and self-awareness of human subjects.
In the natural sciences, the objects of study are inanimate (e.g. rocks, cells, planets), and therefore do not change their behaviour depending on the observer.
True Control is Impossible
- The fundamental trade-off in human sciences is: the more you control human behavior to study it rigorously, the less authentic it becomes.
- And vice versa, the more you preserve its authenticity, the less you can control for confounding factors.
- This is like trying to study how people behave at parties by bringing them into a laboratory and telling them to "act natural" while researchers take notes behind one-way glass.
- The data won't tell you much about actual party behavior because real parties happen in familiar spaces with friends, music, alcohol, and social expectations that can't be replicated in a lab setting.
- This limitation connects to questions about knowledge and certainty.
- Think about it, if our methods for studying human behavior are inherently flawed, what does this mean for knowledge claims in psychology, sociology, and economics?
- So, instead of discovering timeless truths about how all people think and act, human sciences might only be able to describe patterns that work for specific groups in particular circumstances.
- This challenges the assumption that rigorous research should produce knowledge that applies everywhere and always, maybe some knowledge is inherently limited to certain contexts and time periods.
The Reflexivity Problem
- Humans think about thinking, worry about being judged, and modify their behavior based on expectations.
- This reflexivity means that the act of studying people changes what you're studying.
- Survey respondents might give socially desirable answers rather than honest ones and interview subjects might unconsciously adjust their stories to seem more interesting or sympathetic.
- Even more complex is how research findings change the behavior they describe, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- When economists publish studies about market behavior, traders read those studies and adjust their strategies, potentially changing how markets actually function.
- Psychological research about stereotype threat also influence how people perform on tests by making them more aware of stereotypical expectations.
- The Hawthorne Effect emerged from studies of workplace productivity in the 1920s.
- Researchers found that worker productivity increased regardless of what changes they made to working conditions.
- This improvement came from workers feeling observed and valued, not from the specific interventions being tested.
- This revealed how human awareness of being studied fundamentally alters the phenomena under investigation.
Cultural Universality vs. Specificity
- When 96% of psychology research subjects come from societies representing only 12% of the world's population, findings that seem universally human is much more likely to describe only a specific cultural subset.
- Psychological studies on competitive achievement, for example, reveal strong patterns in American college students but weaker or opposite patterns in societies that prioritize collective harmony over individual success.
- The WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) problem isn't that Western research is bad, just that human behavior varies more than most researchers expected.
