Do we and should we study humans objectively?

The implications of categorizing human society as a branch of science is that humans will invariably search for patterns that somehow relate to empirical science, which is built upon scientific experimental methods. As humans, we come up with possible explanations to different observations and we often fit our observations to our own initial premises. In physics class, we were discussing about different scientists and their discordant discoveries, and someone mentioned that "scientists often look for trends that will most likely favor their research and their hypothesis." Therefore, can physics, or biology, or chemistry be considered completely objective when studied by humans? If humans struggle to study even natural sciences, then they do not and should not study human behavior objectively.

Take the Stanford Prison Experiment, for example. Psychologist, Zimbardo, set out with a rational goal: to study the unleashing of evil in human behavior under extreme situations. He separated volunteers into prisoners and guards, and began a prison simulation for collecting data. Two days into the experiment, the researcher found himself just as mentally involved with his research as the volunteers. His human nature, within a certain scope of society (in this case a small prison), was altering his perception of his own research. Zimbardo forgot he was a passive observer, and instead transformed himself into a "prison inspector," barely allowing volunteers to leave the experiment. The ethical limitations of this experiment are evident, and the mental and physical instability of the volunteers were disregarded, as he had absorbed himself into the observation. This is where the 'Widower's Effect' comes into play, as Nicholas Christakis explained in his TED Talk. It is fascinating to notice the domino effect of one human's behavior on others connected to him/her. If your close friend is obese, for example, you are more likely to become obese. In the same manner, Zimbardo also became mentally unstable while studying prisoners' and guards' mental instabilities. Humans are linked to those around them, and in this manner, it is virtually impossible to study human behavior purely objectively.

However, there are ways of measuring human behavior objectively. In the Obedience to Authority Experiments, performed by Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram, there seemed to have been predominantly quantitative data collected. It's interesting that before performing his tests, Milgram interviewed several people, from doctors to students, and when asked what they thought the outcome would be, most of them took what they knew from their own humanity and argued that the volunteers would not obey Milgram's orders during the experiments. However, Milgram carried out his tests, with 40 volunteers, some of which were actors, and clearly set his control, dependent, and independent variables. The results turned out to be shocking, even to Milgram, because most of the volunteers assigned the roles of "teachers" were barely hesitant to obey the observer, and would turn up the voltage in order to harm (or so they thought) the "student." Although it is apparently unbiased research, there are findings that argue otherwise. Even with such objective observation of human behavior, Milgram realized that his volunteers (the ones being observed) were less willing to turn up the voltage when the experimenter wasn't on the room or when they were placed within different scenarios. This is the 'Hawthorne Effect,' in which the observed will respond positively to the experimenter simply because they are being observed and being told more or less what to do. Is this really objective then? It is in the sense that Milgram was not initially influenced by his own understanding of human behavior, but it isn't in the sense that the volunteers were changing the accuracy of results because they used their own subjective lens to somewhat give the observer what they thought he wanted to observe for his conclusion.

Are we ever then, objective in our study of human behavior? And should we? Well, the alien goggles activity we did is another example where objectivity should be implemented, but it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. Some students, like Cati, were able to be more objective, as she stuck her head in the pasta bowl at dinner, for example, as if she really didn't know what she was doing. At times, I was also really objective, and I found myself a little freaked out about all the patterns we go through every day without even acknowledging—it felt like "people-watching" from another species's perspective. However, it was difficult to step away from my own confirmation bias, because I already knew the answer to many of my alien questionings, so to speak. Therefore, we should study human behavior objectively, for the sake of the term 'science' and its implications to the experimental methods, but it is not easy for humans to do that. If even with the natural sciences it is difficult to step away from bias, then it is even more difficult to do so with human behavior, because we are all different in several aspects. There is a limitation between the observer and the observed, in which one will have to resort to subjectivity in order to come up with results. Also, we can't ignore ethical implications of studying human behavior and simply stick to the objectivity in research. Humans behave in distinct ways. In sociology, particularly,  we must understand ourselves and how we function as individuals in order to study other humans' behaviors—human nature may affect nurture, in the same way that nurture might be a dominant feature for explaining how humans affect other humans' behaviors. 

Do we, and should we study human behavior objectively?

There are many different ways that we study the world, and one of the most significant ways we do so, is objectively. This meaning that we study and collect aspects in a factual fashion, documenting and classifying systematically in hopes of laying foundations that can be logically followed. In the sciences, we strive to abandon all our personal biases to gather information objectively - by observation devoid of emotion or opinion. Letting one's experimenter bias meddle with the results is seen in a negative light, it retracts value from the outcome. Human beings are extremely complex, and in this sense there's a debate, on whether we should study ourselves objectively, as a white-coated scientists studies a lab rat, or subjectively, with emotional value.

There have certainly been attempts to study ourselves objectively, but as we'll see from the following example, maintaining an objective position and scientist mentality, proves to be a challenge. The Stanford Prison Experiment was designed to study the psychology of a prison environment - what those with power (the guards) and what the incarcerated inmates experience and the attitudes they lean towards. The guards and the prisoners were randomly assigned to volunteers, the vast majority one of them being Stanford students looking for a summer job. The experiment was scheduled to go on for two weeks, but was stopped after six days. In these six days, the guards managed to go from intelligent young men to sadistic oppressors, the prisoners barricaded themselves inside the cell as a form of uprising, a prisoner was released because of a mental breakdown, and overall, the "fake" prison became very much like a real one. The organizer of the experiment, Philip Zimbardo, assigned himself the role of the prison warden, as well as the psychologist, or the scientific observer, thinking he could do both. Long story short, the role of a prison warden got to his head, and his scientist mindset all but crumbled: he was intent on only one thing - keeping the prisoners were they belonged, their cells. In the documentary, he himself admits he lost track of what it all meant - it ceased to be an experiment and became a reality. This serves to show the sheer difficulty that studying objectively sometimes holds - it's not a matter of simply choosing to stand back and observing, sometimes the dynamics that engulf the observer are just too strong to resist, and he becomes a participant.

On the other hand, an anthropologist might be able to successfully infiltrate a culture - say, an aboriginal tribe in the outskirts of the Amazon, and create a report with objective observations. The scientists needn't intervene with their lifestyles, she might certainly get affected by them (as with learning their language, eating their food, etc.) but her reports might be written as one writes a list of observations on the way a fish swims. There is, of course, personal bias and subjectivity, since the scientist no doubt has a background filled with opinions and beliefs, but then again, who doesn't? Pure objectivity is extremely hard, if not impossible, to attain.

Another point then can be raised, on whether what is best: should we or not attempt to study humans objectively? The Hawthorne effect, in a way, argues we should. This refers to the effect that social experiments have on people - once the subjects known that they're being observed or tested, they will inevitably try harder, to please the observer, or the scientist. This, in turn, changes their actual outcome to a much more positive one. It's too subjective to let the subject know they're being studied, and explains why many experiments take on to catch their subjects off guard - without any knowledge of the experiment. This certain objectivity, and observation point of view, certainly helps to obtain more truthful results, it can serve as an example as to why it is important to study human beings as an entirely different species altogether.

Nowadays, a man in a white coat holds certain assumptions about him. Primarily that he knows what he's doing, and that it's for the sake of science. Despite this, the distance that often separates a professional scientists from a everyday human being can sometimes prove to be harmful. In Elyn Saks's TED talk, she talks about her struggle against schizophrenia - a fearful mental illness that destroys inhibitions and the boundary between reality and fantasy. As she tells her story, we come to know of her mental outbreaks and the consequences: being strapped down to a metal bed for sometimes almost up to 24 hours. All this primarily on the basis that men in white coats deemed her "dangerous", even though she'd never had a violent outburst or deliberately hurt someone. At the end of the talk, she urges the world to see those with mental illnesses as a different race or psychopaths, but human beings in need of support and love. The scientists that deemed her unfit for control over her own life or interactions with others, were holding a barrier between them and the subject. The lack of subjectivity and acknowledgement that they were dealing with human being just like them lead to the assumption that they were different from them.

On a whole, it seems that more often than not, we strive for objectivity, but shift towards subjectivity. When we do create a strong barrier and decide upon objectivity, it can cause harm to others, lack of understanding, and uncertain assumptions. I believe humankind works in ways that we can only understand once we adopt position in which we are willing to connect with each other, mostly through direct, heartfelt interaction. Creating a distance between the observer and the subject only pulls us further away from what is truly important and makes us human, and that is our ability to connect.

Do we and should we study human behavior objectively?

 

In a matter of speaking, it isn’t much a question of if we do or if we should, but more of a can we and would we type. The way the question is currently formulated already makes the assumption that humans have a great capacity in studying human behavior objectively -- I believe they only have a much smaller potential. There are times when humans do manage to get data from tests, such as the Stanford Prison Experiment, that will be further analyzed later, where Professor Zimbardo tested the effects of becoming a prison guard or a prisoner. However, there's the off chance that not everything that humans do give the expected results, as seen with the Hawthorne effect.

The Hawthorne effect was based off a study at Hawthorne Works, an electrical manufacturing company near Chicago, whose goal was to optimize productivity from its workers, and so tested different things such as having more breaks and change in lighting. The result was that any slight change would make them work more because they knew that they were being observed. This effect can also be seen in the Milgram Obedience Experiment where Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, studied the correlation between obedience and authority with that of personal conscience by seeing until what point his patients would send electrical shocks to the actor-victim. His results were that, so long as the volunteer was told to do things in a more serene and pleading tone, while wearing a lab coat (appeal to authority), there would be a much greater rate of obedience even if that meant hurting, and possibly killing, a person. Although the Hawthorne effect actually helped Milgram to get his results (due to the appeasing factor the volunteers did as were asked), in most cases it can tamper the study since the people being studied might stray away from their normal habits in order to create a better self-image, hence tampering with our ability to study humans more objectively. And is there even such a way that we can be straight-to-the-point objective about our decisions?

Being objective can be defined as emotionless as we cannot put ourselves in the shoes of others. Although that might be an easier task when studying another species, when studying our own we can be emotionally hijacked or tampered. Reason and emotion go along side-by-side, so we cannot separate one from another. For instance, if Andrew Wiles, the mathematician who proved Fermat’s last theorem, hadn’t been as dedicated and passionate as he was to solve the so-called impossible mystery, he wouldn’t have been able to do it. Even if we sometimes require emotion to help us reach a conclusion, at times it can stop us from doing so.

In the Stanford Prison Experiment, Professor Zimbardo wasn’t able to finish his investigation because he got emotionally hijacked with the study as he started to think of it more as if he were the prison superintendent rather than a psychologist. And he wasn’t the exception, the environment had become so intense and realistic that the volunteers were taking upon their allotted roles – a university student became the guard or the number that was assigned to them. And not only that, but also John Wayne, the most aggressive guard, said that if he continued in that environment he would have done the same things as those soldiers in Abu Ghraib back in 2003 (extreme prisoner torture). Just seeing the degree of how things got to, would Zimbardo have opted to continue the experiment if that led him to a valid conclusion? And if there were much easier methods to study humans, would people choose to take those measures even if it went against the principles of ethics?

Imagine this scenario: an anthropologist wants to investigate the culture of a really underdeveloped tribe in the unexplored areas of Africa and has all of the resources available to his disposal, including video cameras and microphones. Should he choose to secretly plant those devices and have a variety of unexplored data, while going against the moral principles of privacy amongst many others, or should he try to become part of the community and risk going through the Hawthorne effect? Are these measures invasive to a point in which they might completely alter the path of that tribe, and if so, would it truly be worth it?