Human Sciences

The Hawthorne Effect:  

Between 1924 and 1931 research was conducted at the Hawthorne Works facility in Illinois. The study intended to research the impact of lighting, works structures and break times on worker productivity. They wanted to test whether responding to overall worker’s needs impacted the workers productivity. Nearly every variable the researchers changed lead to an increase in productivity in relation to the control condition. Later, in 1958 Henry A. Landsberger realized that the increased productivity was caused not by the changes in lighting et cetera, but by the fact that the workers knew they were being observed through the study. This has been termed “The Hawthorne effect” or “The Observer effect”. Unlike when the Natural Science does an experiment on the way matter behaves, whenever a study on human behavior is conducted, the very presence of a researcher will impact the results of the experiment. Humans are difficult to model, and experimental design has to be heavily controlled by ethical considerations. So how can a Human Scientist ever know?

Human Sciences and the WAYS OF KNOWING:

Faith:

As with most Areas of Knowledge, certain premises need to be accepted on faith if any knowledge can be built. Among these axioms is the central belief that human behavior is patterned and that researchers can overcome obstacles like the observer effect and others, and once overcome, be able to identify patterns.

Additionally, Faith itself and its role within Religion and Culture will often impact human behavior and needs to be accounted for when attempting to distinguish patterns. Clifford Geertz studied the economic behavior of people in central Java with regards to religious belief. He discovered that before the invention of the steam ship there was a sense of “shared poverty” and a redistribution of any accumulated wealth to as many family members as possible, which made the hoarding of capital impossible. After the invention of the steamship, which made travel to Mecca possible, the commitment to ‘shared poverty’ disappeared so that community members could save up for this important religious obligation.

In another way Durkheim argued that Religion was an expression of a culture's view of itself. The construction, and faith in, a cosmology is a way for a society to express itself to itself.

Reason:

Though it can be considerably more difficult to test a dependent variable in the Human Sciences than in the Natural Sciences, many economists and sociologists do just that when when researching a topic. The HUD (Human and Urban Development) moving to opportunity study is a good example of this. Researchers collected data on three groups of low income households: one control, and two experimental groups. The experimental groups were given vouchers that allowed them to move to different neighborhoods and then collected data on all sorts of different metrics for quality of life. Because they included a control group, inductive reasoning can be used to draw conclusions based on the collected data.

Human behavior is largely unpredictable (though, I recommend looking at the research of Dan Ariely that attempts to predict and explain predictably irrational behavior in humans). The human sciences can, however, make some short term predictions with remarkable accuracy. The world population a year from now, for example, can be estimated with high accuracy. This is because of the Law of Large Numbers, which allows for many random miscalculations and random variables to cancel each other out as the number of instances increases. In this way, human behavior, when considered at scale, can use inductive reasoning as an accurate predictive tool.

Instinct:

Anthropologists who attempt the study of cultures other than their own confront and reveal differences in cultural (learned) instinctive behaviors and thought processes in the cultures they imbed themselves in to study, a practice called ethnography. Increasingly there is a focus to have anthropological research of a community come from within the community being studied (for example it is better for a woman to study organizations of women) since there will be a deeper understanding of subject, and to avoid the colonial or patriarchal prejudices and power dynamics that guided the early history of Anthropology. There is, however, an argument that an outsider can better recognize the important assumptions imbedded in a community. This explained well with the anecdote of the elderly fish who swims by two young fish and asks “how’s the water” after which one of the younger fish turns to the other and says, “what is water?”.

Imagination:

If a being from another planet observed traffic in New York City, the being may see lights turn red and every car stop on command. The  being may reasonably assume that the red light emitted from the traffic light engages the breaks of oncoming traffic. This example highlights one of the difficulties of the Human Sciences. Humans behavior often deal with meaning and purpose rather than physical rules. We have agreed to attribute meaning to the red light. Consequently, to effectively study human behavior, we need to imagine ourselves in the heads of others. This act of empathy requires the use of imagination. A term to research further in this area is the Verstehen position with stresses the understanding of human organizations from inside the minds of the participants.

Additionally, in order to explain certain concepts in psychology or sociology require thought experiments or the construction of a cosmology of mind. The Mixtec people, among others, believe in coessential animals; they believe that life forms born at the same time are linked with each other and share a consciousness manifested through dreams. Similarly Freud built an internal cosmology of Id, Ego, and Superego to explain similar phenomenon. Clearly the imagination is at work.

Sense Perception:

Since it is impossible to read people’s minds, and because self-reporting is an often unreliable methodology, the field of Behaviorism attempts to study human behavior rather than motivations. In other words, Behaviorism uses sense perception to observe and collect data on human behaviors and make predictions.

In the natural sciences the use of instrumentation enhances the senses and allows for deeper knowledge. In the human sciences, like anthropology, for example, the instrument is the ethnographer (Monaghan and Just, A Very Short Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology). When the instrument of observation is human and comes with the flaws and biases of a human sense perception is a clearly precarious way of knowing.

Language:

The research of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf introduced an interesting hypothesis in the field of Human Sciences. Their claim is that language determines our experience of reality. Language is such an integral part of our thoughts that it actually impacts how we experience the world. For example, the anthropologist Peter Farb tested this hypothesis with bilingual Japanese women who had married American servicemen and were living in the United States. They were interviewed on two separate occasions and in their two languages. When asked to complete the this sentence in Japanese, “When my wishes conflict with my family’s…” the women responded, “it is a time of great unhappiness”. When asked to complete the same sentence in English, the women responded, “I do what I want.” Both answers have the same result, but the different answers reveal a difference in the two languages and cultures associated with those languages.

Additionally, researchers in the Human Sciences, as with other Areas of Knowledge, need to deal with the issues raised by Wittgenstein’s linguistic families. An anthropologist who studies the custom of marriage in different communities will find some that allow men to take multiple wives, and some that allow women to take multiple husbands; some that have families arrange the union, and some that allow the individual to chose; some that require marriage to a cousin, and some that have marriage cultural taboo; some that allow same sex marriage, others that find same sex marriage taboo; some that require the female to move in with the male’s family, and others that require the male to move in with the female’s family, and yet others that encourage the couple to find their own residence. In the end the researcher is forced to ask the question of whether the term marriage can be uniformly applied to such different customs with such different expectations.

Memory:

Anthropologist Wade Davis once observed that in an aborigine tribe if a mystic puts a curse on an individual, that individual will likely become ill and possibly die. To study this phenomenon requires and understand of both FAITH and a shared cultural MEMORY. The individual in question has been conditioned since his/her birth that the mystic has this power. The memory of that conditioning, and the faith in this power has the individual lose the will live, and the power of this knowledge impacts the individual's immune system and body function.

Additionally, economic modeling might use past data to test the predictive power of a new model. If record keeping and memory is improved, this process improves as well and becomes a stronger tool in building new knowledge.

Emotion:

Another obstacle to building reliable knowledge in the Human Sciences is bias and prejudice. When studying conceptualizations of gender or economic policy, for example, it may be difficult for the researcher to remove herself/himself intrinsic biases. Additionally, when an anthropologist engages in ethnography, he may over identify and bond emotionally with the subjects of his study. This could result in overlooking information.

Overview:

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