Carolina von Mutius

Hunt ToK – Block 6

 To what extent should we use our humanity to study human behavior?

In the world we live in, the main source of information essentially comes from humans.  Humans were the ones who put together everything that we know and see as “common knowledge”, and although different schemas are based upon different perceptions, in their core, they all originated from discoveries of mankind. With this in mind, when analyzing the question “To what extent should we use our humanity to study humans”, you must first consider everything that has been done and look at examples of each to draw a conclusion. Nonetheless, this question is extremely open-ended and has a lot of room for argumentation.

The first thing that stands out to me about the prompt is the wording. What exactly does “humanity” mean? According to Dictionary.com, it is “the quality or condition of being human; human nature.” Although this seems like a clear-cut definition, there is still a lot of room for interpretation.  Humans are born with a clean slate, though as they develop and grow, they formulate a conceptual framework in which they will furthermore use when judging and studying humans. Also, the prompt also leaves “studying” very open-ended, especially since it’s meaning is a lot greater than simply analyzing human behavior, but rather drawing conclusions based on evidences and data.

By not taking any human science classes, all my knowledge is limited to what I have learned and discussed in ToK. Therefore, all I have acquired from the topic is based on analysis of both sides and balancing each of the points, which in itself is already using my humanity. Nonetheless, at first glance, my mind automatically told me that using humanity would be inadequate for the study of humans. I am not positive on why I came to that conclusion at first, but somewhere rooted in my schema I made the connections that bias would be an influential factors that would potentially jeopardize whichever study was being executed and weigh in negatively. There are various factors that could support this side of the argument, though: for example, whenever you judge someone based on their appearance, you are using your humanity to draw a conclusion. It is inevitable that when seeing someone with several facial piercings and colorful hair and seeing someone wearing head-to-toe designer clothes, your preconceptions of each person will be polar opposites. By using my humanity, I make connections between someone that would be considered “punk” and another considered “preppy”, and that isn’t because I have been analyzing their personalities, but simply based on my prior knowledge and shallowly judging their appearance. If I were to analyze two people coldly without any influential factors, I would just recognize their physical features. But could my generalization based solely on looks be effective in a way? I believe that to a certain extent, making these assumptions will help. In terms of cultural relativism, there are obvious flaws with this concept: what a scientist may imagine to be a pattern to a certain group of people may be just a bias or relative prejudice. But, it also states that many human features, like beliefs, are caused by their cultural and ethnic background, which helps find reasons behind many current trends. Without this, it would make it extremely difficult to gather data of masses and populations, because it would require individual observations, surveys, and interviews, within others.

Looking at humans coldly without using any humanity would be similar to the alien lens activity that we experimented with during ToK. One specific example that I thought was very interesting was one that I read that someone else wrote, that talked about how all humans at the establishment the alien was observing from (school, in that case) were moving around using their two legs, except for one that seemed to be pushed around by someone else and was on top of two circular things (which were wheels). I had to stop and think about that one for a second, but later I realized that it was actually a boy that I had seen just that day that was on a wheelchair. Although this example isn’t necessarily about human behavior, it does symbolize the lack of humanity when observing data. There was no way that the alien would know that the human does move in two legs but is just temporarily hurt thus on a wheelchair, or anything of those sorts. One very interesting point shown through the study of mirror neurons is of different feelings regarding different people. The article by Psychology Today quotes that “Although I do understand what anger and a lot of other feelings feel like, what I really understand is what they feel like to me.” This is the perfect example of how humanity through the use of story knowledge can help understand humans, and further study them. It is hard to find a common definition for “anger” that will fit for every single human being out there, so there must be a compromise made in order to be able to draw any conclusions through therapy or any other strain of psychology for that matter. Just like at the very beginning of the ToK course, when studying perception, when you see a chair, you automatically classify it in the category “chair”, but the concept of “chair” isn’t exactly the chair you are visualizing. This serves for various things, and human emotions are included, so having a common denominator that will help you understand human behavior is important.

On the other hand, the wheelchair boy example can serve as the complete opposite. There could be a whole other reason other than a broken bone for his use of it: he could be using it as a religious ritual, a protest against some cause or maybe even just for fun. The possibilities are endless, but I, using my schema and humanity, concluded that it was for the reasons that I believed were most appropriate. I connected this with the character of Xi in the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, because his humanity in approach to the western culture really distorts his vision on what is what. For example, the character believed that a car was an animal that he had never encountered before, and believed that a simple water bottle was something evil that he had as a mission to destroy. Those things are not part of his culture, so he looks at it a basis on what he knows. If he was conducting an anthropological study with basis on his culture onto the western culture, there would be a strong clash due to incorrect assumptions being made, and he could even go as far as making the logical fallacy even if unaware of Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc. If he believed that the westerners were throwing water bottles in the trash can, he could have assumed it was because they were evil and thus had to be destroyed.

In conclusion, using humanity can both help and hinder conclusions drawn when studying humans. Although it seems reasonable to try to exclude all debatable and relative factors when drawing a conclusion, subjects as difficult to study as humans sometimes require personal knowledge and schema in order to make any valid claims. The Verstehen position states, “in order to really ‘understand’ a human being you have to use introspection and empathy and your own understanding of yourself and bring that to bear on your subject”. This serves to show that all the bias from personal ideologies, beliefs, morals and perceptions may affect data and conclusions, but it is possible to use humanity to help in the human sciences.

Word count: 1266