Sorry, another one on "Do we and should we study human behavior objectively?"

                   

Currently, the human sciences aims to imitate the natural sciences in its approach to study – through an external objective position searching for universal laws independent of human individuality and subjectivity. But in a field that is founded over the rickety ground of subjective, emotional and personal factors, which make up the infamous “human unpredictability” – is this even possible?

                  Well, we definitely try to make it so. Harvard’s Project Implicit is an example of a very objective set of experiments used to explore one of the giants of subjectivity: group bias. In their different experiments, the programmed software analyzes time taken to assort pictures of one discrete group to certain words, the accuracy of the assortment, the answers to a series of multiple-choice questions – data that essentially turns into numbers in a formula that then reveals to you that deep inside, you hate overweight people. Objectively, the science is quite flawless: the independent and dependent variables are defined, the method is reproducible, and the data robust. But do I really hate fat people? Could such an objective test reveal something so deeply subjective about myself with such confidence? The test had me first associate images of overweight silhouettes to “negative” words, and later asked me to switch from this method of assortment to one where I had to associate the silhouettes with positive words. A machine would have little trouble making this transition, but the test failed to recognize the subjective nature of humans, missing the fact that we may be influenced by the order in which we are presented information. By overlooking our subjective factors, such an objective experiment can yield faulty results. Do not assume that human science chooses to be ignorant of human subjectivity, however. Economics, like all other human sciences, stare over the chaos of human unpredictability and subjectivity and must face it. To cope with this chaos, economics actually translates and generalizes this subjectivity into cold, hard objective assumptions: “people are rational maximizers,” “people’s wants are unlimited,” or “people makes choices dependent on future consequences.” All these assumptions seem safe to make, have actually worked almost flawlessly in the field, and truthfully, even the natural sciences make assumptions – the ideal gas law assumes spherical atoms, in mechanics we assume elastic collisions, in most of our physics problems we ignore the effect of relativity. But how do we compare the error in objective generalizations made to cope with subjectivity in the human sciences and the error in generalizations made in the natural sciences? We saw exactly how drastically the behavior of each individual in our class differed from one another when we were asked to abuse the picture of a loved one. Is generalizing such a diverse group of people the same as generalizing how we consider atoms? Are the consequences of doing so of the same magnitude in scientific research?

                  Given all the implications with an objective approach to understand human nature, we should ask ourselves, should we look at human behavior in a purely objective way? The alien anthropologist activity gave a good insight into this question. By looking into human life, ignoring any past experience or emotions I have, I reached completely absurd conclusions about our species however logical they may have been from my objective observations. Emotion and subjectivity are tools in such cases. By considering my own experiences, I am able to deduce that humans are not swimming in pools to undergo osmosis, but for the subjective reason that they enjoy being in the water. Instead of starting from the ground up when trying to reach conclusions objectively, we may use what we already know from our own experiences as an aid. We must be wary, however, as there is a threshold to this idea. Humans try to relate to others – and other things, even – very often, and although in our daily lives we can assume someone jumping up and down is happy, an anthropologist observing a foreign culture must be careful not to. If an anthropologist allows his personal experience influence his thoughts on why a culture is the way it is, he is under danger of applying his own culture to understand another. In other words, the subjective knowledge we carry is not compatible with all other cultures or individuals. This personal bias, and subsequently confirmation bias, is only one example of how an emotional involvement in study may harm scientific results. Through active participation of an anthropologist in a study for a subjective experience, the researcher is not only more prone to directly interfere with the study due to subjective reasons, such as teaching the studied culture to raise a fire above to ground to avoid burns – consequently altering the development and culture of the society – but also in the manner that the presence of the researcher may alter the behavior of the studied.

                  Weighing the benefits and hindrances of the purely objective or excessively subjective study of human behavior, it is clear that a balance must be found between the two methods. Having organized these thoughts on both, a more appropriate question to answer next would be “to what extent should human study be objective or subjective,” as everything must come in good balance.