Using Humanity to Study Humans

Frederico Miguel

Block: 6

Summative Blog Post – Studying Humans

Question: To what extent should we use our humanity to study humans?

            Most scientists try to understand and put into categories everything they study about the phenomena in the universe. In Natural Science, scientists are looking for this perfect interpretation of the world and how it is built. They have strive to be the most objective they can be and try to isolate the variables they want to study. However, in Human Sciences, we cannot isolate the variables we want. Sometimes, we even have difficulty identifying the variable we want to study. When studying this type of science, we are subjected to a plethora of incontrollable variables that might enter in the way of the experiment. Therefore, one way human scientists can interpret their subjects is by applying their life experience and schema when observing society. Thus, using our humanity can be a very resourceful and intelligent way of examining everything single behavior we have.

            Nevertheless by using our humanity, we may perceive something differently from what it really is. For example, people from a city or accustomed to live in places like an urban region have what scientists called a carpentered vision of the world. This is what makes us perceive many illusions and mind-tricks we have through our vision. It happens because some people do not acquire the same type of vision, some people, like the San who live in the Kalahari Desert are not as susceptible to this vision as others. When showed the Müller-lyer Illusion, they could identify that the lines had the exact same length. However, since we have a vision shaped by the many 90-degree angles, most people see the lines as if they had different lengths. This hypothesis demonstrates that our humanity is also based on our (eligibly) 5 senses. Thus, having to perceive the world by our own eyes, we might end up loosing the opportunity to understand other cultures or experiences. If any observer, who lived in cities his whole life, tried to interpret what the San see through his own eyes, there would be a quite huge misunderstanding of his part, making the experience flawed and untrue by science’s standards.

            In the other hand, if we could separate our emotions, memories, language and sense in other to observe a society, we would not be able to understand them. Our brain works in many mysterious ways, it is always trying to categorize everything we sense, but one of its ways of understanding the world is by the use of mirror neurons. This ability to copy actions is what makes babies walk, talk and learn new things. We are adaptable to many different experiences and that is why we can learn new things even in adulthood. If we agree this “ability” is part of being human, then we can argue that it is quite essential to many studies. Since those type of neurons mimic others actions as if we were doing them, many sciences could not be interpreted correctly without this part of our “humanness”. Psychology, for example, is always trying to see patterns in society and attempt to create story and map knowledge of how we live and act in certain situations. Without mirror neurons, we could not create map knowledge. We would not be able to generalize any kind of behavior because there would be no way to “connect the dots” in between our thoughts and other people’s actions. This essential part of being human is what permits us to comprehend most part of our shared knowledge. This is also what causes empathy, which some might say is the quintessence of humanity.

            The claim about empathy in humanity can be a very important part of understanding whereas some people might say that it can prevent people from really comprehending what is going on. The Verstehen Position claims that in order for a person to completely understand someone else they have to use introspection. In psychology, observation and story knowledge can be very resourceful. When you try to stay in this Verstehen Position, you end up using your own knowledge as a way of knowing. Different from Natural Science, when you can measure substances and where laws of physics, biology and chemistry are used and proved to be right, Humans Sciences cannot assume that something will happen just because it happened before. Even if 100% of the people who did an experiment drank water after running a lap around the field, we cannot know for sure if any other would do the same. Maybe they are Muslims during Hamadan and can only drink water after the sun went down or they are not tired after only one lap. There are infinite reasons why someone would not demonstrate a common behavior and this is why in Human Sciences we try to examine the individual and not the general information. Thus, generalizing and putting data into categories in our brains, as I previously stated, is not something we should do when studying humans. Our mind is different and shaped in different ways. If anyone tries to grasp a comportment by using introspect and empathy, we might get a lot of different results and knowledge claims that might be incorrect.

            According to Sigmund Freud, human beings have three levels of mind. Conscious, preconscious and unconscious. For him, this is part of our day-to-day life, even though we don’t notice at times. A preconscious mind is anything we can retrieve it and think about it when we want to, like childhood memories and words we rarely use, but when we read them we understand them. The conscious mind is everything we are aware of, like our logic, reason, emotion and some of our memory. Juxtaposing that, we have the unconscious mind, which stores any memory of pain, life experiences and feelings we do not wish to remember, but they still influence us on our decisions and perceptions. Therefore, by using our humanity when we studying, it might make us misinterpret what the person is trying to do. For example, a year ago when I was trying to understand a behavior of a classmate when she claimed that she would never try an alcoholic beverage, my head was quite messed up because I was trying to use my knowledge to understand her behavior. At that time, I remembered when I was young and also thought that I would never try alcohol, which made me think that due to my past experience she would definitely try alcohol in the future. This was my unconscious mind influencing my thoughts. That way of thinking was part of my humanity and since humans are adaptable, we may also use our humanity to help us comprehend our own feelings and study ourselves before we study others. We can also change during the years and gain more experience. If that can create a way of thinking that makes us doubt even ourselves, then humanity could even help us study different types of people while we compare with one another.

            So far, we could not separate our humanity when studying other humans. When we try to understand someone without the usage of empathy and introspection, we might misinterpret their action and create a false knowledge claim. However, at the same time, we cannot create a single version of how humans behave and try to categorize everything humans do because we would foolishly fall into untrue stereotypes. The best thing to do when studying human behavior is to create two or more reactions to what is happening and make a shared knowledge with a lot of bright people with different backgrounds, because then, we could try to understand how one behavior might interfere with another. By creating shared knowledge we lower our chances of misinterpreting something strive for a complete or – at least - more accurate understanding of how humans think and act.

           

Word Count: 1297

           

Müller-Lyer Illusion: