3.2.1 How We Study People Notes

Using Human Minds to Study Human Behavior

1. When you observe a chemical reaction, molecules won't change their behavior because they know you're watching but humans would.
2. They might act more politely, exaggerate their responses, or try to figure out what you want to hear.
3. 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.

True Control is Impossible

1. The fundamental trade-off in human sciences is: the more you control human behavior to study it rigorously, the less authentic it becomes.
2. And vice versa, the more you preserve its authenticity, the less you can control for confounding factors.

The Reflexivity Problem

1. Humans think about thinking, worry about being judged, and modify their behavior based on expectations.
2. This reflexivity means that the act of studying people changes what you're studying.
3. 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.
4. Even more complex is how research findings change the behavior they describe, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
5. When economists publish studies about market behavior, traders read those studies and adjust their strategies, potentially changing how markets actually function.
6. Psychological research about stereotype threat also influence how people perform on tests by making them more aware of stereotypical expectations.

Cultural Universality vs. Specificity

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Cross-cultural research reveals that many "fundamental" behaviors vary dramatically across societies.
5. Eye contact patterns, personal space preferences, decision-making styles, and even basic cognitive processes show cultural variation that challenges assumptions about universal human psychology.

The Ethics Constraint

1. The most important questions about human behavior often require the most harmful experiments to answer definitively.
2. Human scientists can't randomly assign some children to abusive households and others to loving families to study how childhood trauma affects adult development.
3. They can't manipulate people's core beliefs to observe how worldview changes influence behavior.
4. They can't create genuine experiences of discrimination, poverty, or loss to study their psychological effects in the name of "science."
5. If they did, this would violate the fundamental principle that people have inherent dignity and rights that supersede research goals.
6. This forces them to rely on observational studies, natural experiments, and retrospective analysis that provide less definitive causal evidence than controlled experiments would.

No Single Explanation Captures The Full Reality

1. Human phenomena exist simultaneously at multiple levels that can't be reduced to each other.
2. The problem exists because human behavior emerges from the interaction of all these levels simultaneously.
3. Charitable giving involves both genuine empathy and social signaling, both moral reasoning and evolutionary programming, both individual personality and cultural conditioning.
4. Each discipline develops tools optimized for its particular level of analysis, but these tools have blind spots when applied beyond their scope.

Practical Applications and Limitations

1. Policymakers need guidance for decisions that can't wait for perfect evidence, but overconfident application of limited research findings can cause real harm.
2. This creates pressure to produce actionable findings even when the evidence remains provisional or limited in scope.
3. The challenge involves calibrating the certainty of knowledge claims with the urgency of practical needs.