The Social Sciences

Social scientists such as psychologists and economists have long believed that they could, by making some key assumptions and simplifications, explain human behaviors generally.  Ultimately this prevailing belief is the underlying premise of such theories as Game Theory, the various behavioral theories, and economic modeling that pervade mainstream academia.  Basically, if we can understand human behavior, we should be able to manipulate them into become more productive, happy, and peaceful.  Butterflies and rainbows.

The problem is in the ‘key assumptions and simplifications.’  Human cognition requires that we, consciously or unconsciously, omit certain attributes and focus on others so that we can classify things into meaningful groups and create an order  that makes sense to us.  We can’t make sense of the world if we take in everything, since our minds are only so complex, and cannot come close to approaching the complexity of the world (considering that each individual mind is part of the world, it is logically impossible for any single mind to comprehend it).  As such, we use heuristics (mental shortcuts of assigning things we perceive into our mental construction of the world) to simplify the world into something comprehensible.  For example, you see a green Volkswagon Beetle parked out on the street and you recognize that it’s a car.  Passing by, a red Corvette is also identified as a car.  Comparing the two side by side, they have very distinct features, and it might be strange for someone, not understanding the key features (e.g. 4 wheels, self-propulsion) which identify them as cars, to identify them as belonging to the same class.  Yet, with all the cars on the road of various shapes, sizes, colors, etc., it takes no more than a fraction of a second for us to identify them within the group of automobiles.

This is how social science works as well.  In order to model human action, scientists must first categorize individuals into meaningful groups, assumed to be homogenous (everyone within a group is assumed to be exactly the same).  Then we can explore how those groups react to various stimuli in various contexts.  Everyone that is shy goes in this bucket, the ambitious ones go here, the smart ones are in this group, etc.  But this simplification is critically flawed in that it assumes a simplicity that simply does not exist.  These sciences exclude relevant factors that must be ignored because they would be impossible to fully identify and quantify.  Furthermore, social scientists face the problem of human change, where we can actually change behavior over time.  We learn, develop, find new interests, we are influenced by others, and so forth.  The complexity of the human mind and soul are such that all relevant factors can never be accounted for at any given time.

So is social science a fraud?  Is it a meaningless pursuit of the impossible?  Well, as a social scientist myself, I’ll broadly answer no.  But more specifically, yes, it is an exercise in futility, and must be recognized as such.  The most dangerous science is the type that fails to recognize the errors of the study.  Such studies may and indeed have influenced people into behaving improperly because of the incorrect or incomplete assumptions made by scientists.  Community planners, socialists, and governments in general have suffered from such misleading. 

Rather than continually insisting on learning how to manipulate people, scientists must eschew such a mentality, even criticize it for what it is: a ridiculously false egotism.  Instead we must turn our attention to understanding how individuals deal with such differences, how they cope with and manage the complexity and uncertainty that surrounds them, and how individuals themselves (and no one else) can change themselves for the better.

We must understand what we don’t know if we are to have a chance of correctly assessing what we can know.  And we know a lot less about the human mind and behavior than social scientists would like to believe.