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

      Looking at what we have been doing in TOK, I came to the conclusion that you can never truly have perfect results on human behaviour. There will always be flaws to the experiments that are conducted on humans. Moreover, nowadays researchers aren't allowed to conduct experiments on humans without them knowing that they are being tested. Therefore the results become even more inaccurate, as a person will most likely change their behaviour to get the best possible result out of themselves or to please the one conducting it. As an example for this we can look at tests and surveys that people are asked to fill out. A person will most likely be willing to alter their results a bit to convince themselves that they have good results or they don't want statistics to show their results. Even if these are anonymous, a person will most likely want to give the best of themselves to the quiz rather than being completely honest. This is exactly why it can be extremely difficult to use our own humanity to test human behaviour because we want to be optimistic about the results. This relates to the Hathrown effect found by physiologists, the fact of changing your behaviour when you know you are being observed.  As we saw in the Alien activity, once we use an outsider lens on the world that we live in and observe the people surrounding us with a different point of view, we become much more honest. In the Alien exercises, pretending to know nothing about the human culture, really showed how there are many different ways of interpreting our habits and what we do. These day to day things may seem normal to us and we don't see anything unusual about it. But as we take a step back we can see that what we do doesn't always make the most sense. Therefore if you wanted to really analyse human behaviour, I think it would be much more effective from an outsider point of view.

       Secondly, it can also be very difficult to look at human behaviour using our humanity because there are two different types of knowledge and then we have to combine it to make even more knowledge. However looking at those different two types of knowledge, in the end we might get the most logical answer to us but not the most accurate one. Those two types of knowledge are map knowledge and story knowledge. Story knowledge is the knowledge gained by someone through experiences. Here we can already see that something like story knowledge is bound to have different people's opinions and own views on the experiments which would make the knowledge gained less valuable. When each person has zoomed in and looked the particular aspect that they wanted to test or know more about. It can be in any possible domain, we combine it all to make it one big map of knowledge. We can see as an actual map of the world. Some people will be focusing on one little town of a city, they will add it to the city which will be added to the country which will be added to the continent and so on until you get a big map of all the knowledge that you will have gathered.

       Moving on, human scientists have many different ways of testing things. Economists for example use computer models. However I emphasise on the word "model", they often time use computers to do these. But as computers are used, the models don't take into consideration the story knowledge that might have been taken into consideration by a human. Another limitation that economists might encounter would be ceteris paribus, which means that you assume that things won't change when you think of a specific product. We know that the world changes and things evolve, i don't think assuming that will give you accurate results in the end. If you don't consider change than you cannot predict what will happen in the future. If you base our findings on the certainty that it won't change then we aren't looking at a wide range of possibilities but just the ones that will be happening in the immediate.

        Emotion might be the biggest factor of why we using our own humanity to study human behaviour would be difficult. I think that humans would get emotional about their studies and therefore not always make the most logical and rational decisions. We would want our affection for certain people get in the way of more accurate results. Equally perception, we as humans could perceive certain behaviours one way but not truly understand what is going on in another community. The way that we have gained knowledge and our culture might influence the way that we analyse others or even understand them. Finally, as we cannot test for all of the populations in the world we tend to use generalizability. Therefore since we cannot test all people we might make assumptions about other people when they might not have gotten the same results.  Continuing, a limitation that they could find would be cultural relativism. Different people come from different backgrounds and so different factors affect them.
A very good example of emotion, perception and reasoning can be seen in the film The Gods Must Be Crazy, the character Xi gives us an excellent example of how his perception of the world around him can gets in the way of how he understands others. Just like cultural relativism, since he comes from a different background, different factors affect him. For example when he finds the coke bottle, him and his family don't see it as a glass bottle but rather as the hardest object they have ever seen and start using it as a tool in their everyday lives, until they it starts creating violence amongst them, a feeling they had never experience and they start calling it the "evil thing." When he tries to give it to a human closer to our culture and that he runs away, he thinks it is because he is afraid of the "evil object", rather than because he is holding a gun.

        In conclusion, we could say that, in most cases, using our humanity would get in the way of getting accurate results of human behaviour.  When we look at recent events for example, we can never truly know what is going on in another country and how they react to it compared to how we see it and how we react to it. The media can show us images and we can listen to reports about what is going on, but in the end we can't truly make a conclusion about what exactly is happening. I think that researches shouldn't completely disregard humanity when they study human behaviour because we aren't robots. If they wouldn't use humanity at all then the results wouldn't lead to accurate results either. They have to know how to control how much humanity they use. Finally, they cannot result to using humanity to studying human behaviour they have to use all the other ways of learning and of knowing in order to guarantee the best results.