The Social Sciences

The social sciences consist of several different subjects, all concerned with explaining human behaviour.

Political science: looks at politics, and measures how successful governments are. It also deals with patterns in voting and the way parties work.

Geography: studies why people live where they live, and looks for patterns in the environments where living things can be found.

Sociology: studies human relations, the structure of societies and organizations, customs, as well as individuals and groups.

Psychology: studies the mental process of human beings. They look for behavioural patterns that will aid in understanding and predicting reactions.

Economics: how people get their living, and sustain their basic needs and wants for food, drink, shelter, amusement or service. Looks at how goods are distributed. The aim is to understand it, so as to improve it.

Anthropology: looks at human beings, and their physical being, their evolutionary history, race, distribution, and cultural history.

The social sciences strive to use the scientific method. There are some problems however, since the social sciences deal with human beings.

The first step of the method is observation. Observing human beings can be difficult because of the Hawthorne Effect, where people change their behaviour because they know that they are being observed.

The second step is composing a hypothesis. This is possible, but verifying the hypothesis can be difficult since results can be subjective because the measurements are abstract (happiness, progress, patriotism). This is why there are theories that have never been tested.

The third step is the experiment, and this is extremely problematic. It is hard to do experiments with human beings. One possible way of doing it is through opinion polls, but even surveys present some problems. First of all, the way in which a question is asked might have an effect on the way people answer. Another problem is how should the answers be classified? People will generally try to give an honest answer, but also do not want to make themselves look bad. People’s answers depend on who they are, their ethnic, religious, economic, professional, educational background, their age and so forth. When conducting a survey it is important to know these things, but how do you know which one of the classifications to use?

When conducting experiments on human beings several ethic questions arise. There are two, almost infamous experiments that have pushed the limits of what is ethically acceptable. The first is the Milgram experiment. The experiment was advertised as research to see the effects of pain on learning. When the subject arrived, they were told that they are the “Teacher”. They were introduced to the “Leaner”, to whom the teacher was supposed to give some memory tests. Every time the learner answered wrong, the teacher was supposed to give an electric shock, which got stronger as the experiment continued. When the teacher hesitated in delivering the shock, the experimenter, a person in a white coat, told them to continue. About 60% of the people went on to deliver a fatal shock. In reality, the learner was an actor, and was not actually shocked, but the teacher did not know this. This says something about how people will obey authority figures, and hand over responsibilities for their actions to others.

Another infamous experiment is the Stanford Prison Experiment, where the cellar of a corridor at Stanford. Some of the subjects were prison guards, and others where prisoners. From the start the prisoners were humiliated, upon arrival they were deloused and given a poor quality uniform. The prisoners at first rebelled, and the guards became increasingly aggressive. Eventually the prisoners, tired of the aggressiveness and the humiliation became more passive. The experiment had to be stopped after six days, since the conditions got so chaotic. This experiment shows how in unfamiliar situations people will follow the group and do what the group does.

There is one final issue with the scientific method and the social sciences. It is hard to draw conclusions and distinguish between cause and correlation. There is also the question of determinism and free will. How far do people act of their own free will, and to what extent are circumstances predetermined?

There are two different predominant schools on conducting research in the natural sciences. The first is known as “Holism”, which is concerned with how the group as a whole acts.  You should not look so much at individuals, because individuals behaviour derives from the context that is created by the whole group. The Verstehen position is the opposite: look at the individuals, and get inside the group. This is the only way that you learn why people do things, and this is the point in the human sciences: to understand the motivation behind actions.

In this unit I found the discussion about the extreme experiments particularly interesting. Both the Milgram experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment reveal something about free will. The results of the Milgram Experiment seem shocking because most people would like to believe that they have a free will, and would not deliver the fatal shock just because someone who seemed to be in authority told them to do so. In reality over half of the people did. People are afraid to disobey orders from someone they have accepted as an authority, and perhaps it is because they feel that they are no longer responsible for their actions that they are ready to potentially kill someone on request. The Stanford Prison experiment shows that even though you have perfectly normal, stable people as prison guards, they get more and more violent, because that is what everyone else is doing. People follow other’s examples, because they don’t know what else they can do. So much for free will.

Even though I do not study any of the social sciences, I think that understanding the complexity of understanding human behaviour is important for anyone. It is hard to know why people act the way they do, but by understanding that it is a mix of the influence of the group, and the individual might help. Also, it is important to understand that any results that social scientists come up with are to be regarded with a little bit of scepticism.