In order to truely answer this question, a definition of humanity is needed. For the purposes of this blog post, the definition in regards to study is "any sort of intervention that is done for reasons involving emotion." Our own humanity provides a large amount of help, but it also hinders our possiblility in studying human behavior for many reasons.
A main example of how our own humanity can hinder our ability to study human behavior lies in the confirmation bias, where one searches to make their conclusions fit their data, instead of looking at the data and determining all possible meanings of this data. While we need our humanity in order to at least have a conclusion and use our emotion to decide what is most likely or we should choose, this confirmation bias causes many mistakes in sciences and leaves unreliable data. Another problem with things like this is the subject themself in social experiments, where they assume what you want and then seek to do that. They decide what your conclusion should be or what you want it to be and then adjust their behavior so that happens. It is for this reason that experimentors need to "lie" to subjects slightly, so they don't cause these kinds of errors in experiments. A prime example of this is in an experiment that so clearly shows us why we should not involve our own humanity, the Stanford Prison Experiment. First of all, the bias from the man in charge Philip Zimbardo became too obsessed with the work of the experiment and became so much a part of it that when he heard there would be a "jail break" he prepared all the "inmates" to leave to another place to keep the jail running. Also, in this same experiment, one of the "guards" admits that he thought that the experiment was to prove the depravity of people in situations of power, so he started being harsher to the inmates, showing the other side of the confirmation bias.
However, our own humanity can be very helpful when in an experiment. For example, when Brene Brown tried to conduct her experiment about human vunerability she failed to accurately understand the results she had gotten until she put her own humanity in. Although when she did, it cause her to have a bit of a "break down" showing that using your own humanity can make you more vunerable and potentially bad for you as a person, although perhaps good for the experiment. On the other hand however, when you look at things completely removed from your humanity, such as we did in our alien experiment, it causes a huge lack of understanding. There is no understanding of the culture or emotions of those we study. A big example of this in the alien experiment is what one person recorded, saying that love is a precious resource that is running out, and thus must be replaced by an alternate source or other wise planned for the lack of it. Thus, removing your humanity entirely is not a good solution either.
One area of the human sciences that particularly needs to watch out for how much humanity is involved in their experiments is pyschology. The main reason for this in pyschology is that many things they do could negatively affect people for their entire lives. Many experiments like the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment which danced along the edge of morality in experiments and what could be done to acquire the information necessary caused a creation of a moral code by which pyschologists must adhere to. This of course, removes a certain amount of knowledge that can be obtained by pyschologists, but ultimately saves the sanity and mental health of the subjects, which is more important than that information.
Another thing of interest in the human sciences that benefits from humanity is looking at mental illnesses. There needs to be a certain amount of empathy and understanding that only really comes from humanity being used when looking at these illnesses. This is especially seen in the TED Talk by Elyn Saks about illness from the inside where she talks about having mental illness and managing to overcome it. She calls for people to understand the illness and have empathy instead of imprisoning those with mental illness or restraining them, and that they would then understand them better and morally be better for not causing distress to the patients.
Basically, in the end, it is better in most cases to add a bit of humanity when studying human behavior, but it is best to not use too much. Too much tends to lead to a result that is oddly inhumane for the amount of humanity used, and often a lack of information and/or understanding. Without any, however, it becomes impossible to understand basically anything involved in the human behavior.
Mitch, you've accomplished a lot in a few words. The best thing about your post is your reasoning. Each of your paragraphs offers one idea that furthers the reader's understanding of the knowledge question. That is an excellent way to approach a ToK prompt. Now, if you want to rewrite, there are a few things that will help you access the next markband. 1) Instead of restricting your definition of humanity to be just emotion, I would define it as a) our emotions b) our prior knowledge, beliefs and experiences and c) our ethical sens (humanity in terms of being humane). You already have all of these in your post, you just didn't draw a line among them. By doing it this way, you cover ethics as a AoK, perception (the schema) as a WoK, and emotion as a WoK. So, I would reorganize the intro and paragraphs to fall in line with this. 2) You need more examples. Your Stanford one works great. Now what else is there? Check the book for ideas. It's great that you connected the question to class activities, but these can't stand in for actual examples from the subject areas. Do these 2 things and the quality of your post will rise dramatically.
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