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

Gabriela Campos

A series of mistakes can be made when approaching the study of human behavior. There are so many ways of studying our fellow humans: you can conduct experiments, partake in participant observation, develop models, and conduct questionnaires, amongst many other methods. So perhaps the biggest mistake researchers make when approaching the study of human behavior, is to assume that there is one perfect, unparalleled way of doing so. Different situations and subjects will call for different approaches, and these approaches might feature a higher or lower level of need for the researchers’ own humanity to be used. So the superior ways of studying human behavior (be it through a psychological, anthropological, sociological, or even economical lens) are not characterized by a low or high level of humanity being used, but, rather, if the level of humanity employed is used according to what and how a certain aspect of human behavior is being studied.

 In order to fully explore this idea, first, one must consider: what constitutes “humanity?” This is a more complex issue that, for the sake of answering the proposed question, will be answered with a definition. Although there are many definitions of “humanity,” the one that will bear valid in this post is the following: humanity is all nonphysical manifestations of a person inflicted by or on their biology, environment, and cognition. This may include things such as language, emotion, and reasoning. The study of human behavior, then, will be categorized as a subsection of the human sciences, an area of knowledge under the ToK curriculum. Different, infinite definitions of both topics can be established when studying this knowledge question. However, like in the Burning House activity, these definitions I chose will serve as manageable frames which decide what knowledge issues and claims are discussed and which are left out.

A big issue that is usually associated to the influence of the researcher’s humanity when studying other humans is how much should one rely on their emotions or on their reason. We, however, cannot determine that these are mutually exclusive approaches, or, as it is widely believed, that they even lie on opposite ends of the same spectrum. So, they will be explored separately. Feelings are key to humanity; they are, according to Antonio Damasio (a human scientist himself), cognitive manifestations of our responses to outside stimuli. Accordingly, they may influence the way we interpret results. And since emotions are heavily based on past experiences, no two researchers will have the same emotional response about the same thing and, consequently, may reach different conclusions about it, without certainty of which one is valid. However, emotions cannot simply be seen as negative interference, as they absolutely aid in the understanding of human behavior. As the Verstehen position claims, in the human sciences, one must “understand a human being” by using “introspection and empathy.” That emotional response, especially the empathic response elicited by mirror neurons, helps humans understand each other, which is the core of the human sciences. Too much emotional involvement can lead to discrepancies in the research and negative interference, however, without any emotional involvement, little progress would have been made in the human sciences field as it takes humanity to understand humanity as the human experience is not fully quantifiable. Reason as a way of knowing, evidenced through the use of mathematics in the human sciences (a cross-over of areas of knowledge, which is how they are usually seen in practice, as opposed to theory), for example, is also indispensible in the study of human behavior. Especially when researching aspects very foreign to oneself. For example, if a researcher has gone to a Brazilian high school their entire life where they begin class at 1 PM, they may never speculate high school students who are made to wake up at 7AM to attend class may show lowered academic performance. However, if faced with numbers, quantitative data, that support that hypothesis, they will be able to see evidence of this happening and incorporate that piece of knowledge into their knowledge base. Numbers, processed through reason, may illustrate and introduce prevalence of certain phenomena of human behavior that may be foreign to those that have never experienced said behavior, be it first hand or through observation.  

Numbers also come into play when generalizing results. It will be taken as truth in this post that the main goal of the human sciences and, consequently, the study of human behavior is to, through story knowledge, generate generalizable results into map knowledge that is then to be used to understand and predict patterns in human behavior. With this in mind, it must be understood what fraction of the population is being represented in the results, in order to judge whether there is enough representation in the data to generalize onto a subset of or the entire population. This, however, is not a process that relies only on math, but also on other aspects of reason such as induction (deduction is used rarely in the field of human sciences as nothing is ever 100%). Reason is affected by cognition, and, therefore, can be considered part of our humanity, as it is also a quality usually heavily attributed to humans. Using induction, however, raises the question of the problem of induction, which may constitute faulty reasoning. It will pass the coherence and pragmatic truth checks, but it might not correspond to everything that is represented in the world. Especially with something as diverse as human behaviors, many “facts” will be attributed to the general population, but won’t necessarily apply to all individuals in it.  As Wade Davis states in his TED Talk, humans are so diverse, we create an ethnosphere that can’t be reduced to simple rules or theories. So, when coming to any conclusions, possible problems with said conclusions such as the problem of induction and generalizability to the level of the individual must be explicitly stated.

The generalization of information leads to the creation of theories, a central part of the human sciences, about human behavior. Theories are solid hypotheses that have been widely accepted for they have been so substantially supported by research. This does not mean, however, that they cannot be refuted. The concept of theories really follows the claim that states knowledge is provisional. However, theories usually find their way into our widely held paradigms. Paradigms deeply influence the way we see the world, they are the lenses through which we observe phenomena around us. Consequently, they are part of who we are as humans. And, as expected, they may negatively influence research of human behavior. Paradigms, perhaps, are the most negative aspect of humanity to employ when studying human behavior. They may generate confirmation bias, as we look for observations that will already confirm our premeditated ideas (which are guided by our paradigms), they may negate the concept of cultural relativism, as individuals might propagate too many paradigm-set values of their own cultures when studying others that don’t hold the same paradigms, as well as create the Hawthrone effect in subjects, who in their turn influence the study of human behavior as they are not behaving naturally in front of the researcher because they wish to show what they deem to be demand characteristics (a designation made by employing their paradigms about behavioral research). Fixed paradigms are so treacherous because they may also make one believe there is one aspect of human behavior that is immutable and an absolute truth. For example, one may believe that their Welsh view of social reality is the standard to which all social realities should be measured. This is the type of idea that absolutely cannot be generalized or used when studying human behavior of different cultures. It alienates the customs and ideals of other social realities. Someone considered poor in a culture might be considered noble and pure in another. For example, those who are part of the religious community described in the novel Siddhartha by Herman Hesse are seen as noble when they give up their material possessions and take to begging on the streets. The same person might be seen by an individual from Sydney as a poor beggar, when really they are regarded as enlightened by others who take part in similar religious rituals. It is a very positivist approach, claiming there is one, true reality to be attained. The human sciences are far more constructivist: there are many realities that are built through the existence, behaviors, cultures and experiences of certain individuals, societies, and groups. Realities are not generalizable to the whole world.

Another side of our humanity, however, arises in the face of paradigms: the desire to break them. Without our human desire to seek knowledge and question theories, there would never be advancement in the field of human sciences. We need that aspect of humanity in regard to paradigms in order to keep generating knowledge about ourselves. Our very humanity is the driving force behind the new knowledge claims and issues about human behavior that arise from studies, making it absolutely indispensable in the study of human behavior. Nonetheless, after conducting studies, an important thing to do, even if you have or have not intentionally allowed your humanity to interfere with your research is to acknowledge possible mistakes in your data when sharing your results. A lot of human science is transforming story knowledge into map knowledge for predictions. So, when you obtain your own sample and try to generalize it, you have to acknowledge the problems with it before you allow it to be sewed into the quilt that is map knowledge. You can’t allow someone to build up on your knowledge if it doesn’t provide a firm foundation for them to do so. Generating this shared knowledge of human behavior is a collaborative effort. This is positive, for it might lead to replications of your studies by people who try to take care of the biases you could not remove. Essentially, there is no way to study everything perfectly, but collaboration and many views of one thing may help. Although it is impractical time-wise, in the long run, it allows us to build the most complete and closest to accurate knowledge base that we can.

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