Do we and should we study human behavior objectively?

Do we and should we study human behavior objectively?

We humans, are pretty similar to each other, but every different human being, each individual, can vary in many different ways from one to the other that we cannot study the human behavior objectively. The main focus of science is to make a generalization of some sort but you can't do that with humans because actions vary and so does each ones personality. There isn't and can't be a law that applies to us (humans) all because we are all unique individuals. I personally do not like the word unique but it does fit into this case, even for perfect, identical twins. They can be physically very similar to each other, but their personality can be very different as well as their beliefs. There are different genders, men and women and many different sexual orientations so we can't make distinctions. Small distinctions can't be small upon humans but there can be made to a larger scale of humans. As read in “The social sciences” packet, it can be that social science is not fully developed yet, maybe it is at the bottom of their youth and that it has still a lot to grow and learn and that maybe in a few years or so, extremely accurate predictions can be made, but not now.

In social sciences there is no constant, just as it needs for science because the objects in this case the humans and they are always moving and in constant change so there is nothing that you can compare it with. There is no way to measure social data with numbers just as you do with natural sciences. You can't find a way to measure someone’s love for the other or how deep does one respect the other. No way of measuring that. In science you need to have all of your variables labeled and controlled and you have to make sure you are doing the right things because you want to have the results that you predicted in your hypothesis. In social science, you don't have those variables that you need in order to complete a lab.

Objectively means without influence by emotions or personal prejudices and it’s based on observable phenomena; presented factually. Most of its definitions will surround this idea that it is based on facts and not on emotions. You can study humans objectively but also subjectively, it really depends on what you are looking for and what is the purpose of your experiment. In order to understand and test the human behavior you can’t simply ignore one. Both can add to each other in order to make a more defined answer. A great example is Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment that we’ve seen in class. What seemed to be an experiment, we could see that something a lot more than what was expected came out of it. Every human in the experiment got very into the experiment forgetting they were basically just playing a role play. Some “actors” were not allowed out of the experiment which made them even more mad because they were actually being trapped as prisoners. This altered their emotions and the way that they saw things inside the “prison”. Here for example, we can’t simply observe, we have to take in consideration their emotions too; they were also going through a lot of stress under that situation.

There is no commandment that we can compare every human into, which means that to study the human behavior we can’t only observe and act as if they were all the same, going to the same things and also feeling the same. Everyone is different from another person even if they are identical twins.  We have to make a mixture, depending on the case of both subjective and objective because when we are testing something we want to make sure we will get the right answers and by mixing both of them, knowing when to use them because in some cases both is required but not in all, so that we can have a more accurate and precise answer.