Human/Social Sciencesin TOK

“I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of crowds.” – Isaac Newton

• What are the human/social sciences?• The study of society and human behavior –

including economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, philosophy, history, education and more. What makes this challenging?

Natural vs. Human Sciences

What is the goal of the natural sciences & what are the methods/tools they use?

To discover laws/rules that apply to nature and make useful predictions. Scientific tools include experimentation, observation, measurements, data analysis.

What about the goals and methods of human sciences? Why should they differ? Aren’t we humans part of nature?

We share 99% of our genes with apes and we are composed of the same basic chemical ingredients as other living things (hydrogen, oxygen, etc.)

Social sciences vs. natural sciences (goals, objects of study, methods of study) – see the IB knowledge framework for the human sciences

Imagine a group of alien scientists trying to study human behavior, recording this observation:

“A large crowd of people in a room, dressed in long flowing robes and flat boards of fabric on their heads, are lining up to climb some steps onto a big wooden box. When they do so, a person dressed similarly hands them pieces of paper, and the other people bang their hands together simultaneously.”

What KQs does this bring up to your mind? How influenced are we on our own personal

knowledge when trying to know others? How can we get to know anything without experiencing it?

Abel’s packet “The Social Sciences”

• What do you think about the differences between the natural and social sciences?

EXPERIMENTS

• Ideally, experiments should play a huge role in human sciences, just as in natural sciences. But… what challenges are there?

• Complex real-world situations – hard to replicate with controlled experiments

• The artificial conditions of experiments can distort behavior.

• Experimenting with people - ethical concerns – negative effects on participants (Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6HLDV0T5Q8 (5:25)

ceteris paribus?

• Other things being equal• the assumption that nothing else changes• Widely used in natural sciences. Examples?• Example from economics: Law of demand – the

demand for a product increases as its price falls, ceteris paribus.

• It’s very hard to control variables when working with people.

LAWS, EXPLANATIONS & PREDICTIONS

• The main goal of science is to come up with laws and theories to explain and predict. What are some challenges when it comes to finding the laws that apply to human behavior?

• Aren’t we all different, unique as individuals?• The idea of such laws seems to contradict the

assumption of human free will.• Human beings can be unpredictable, random and

irrational.• The law of large numbers – in a large population,

random variations tend to cancel out. Allows social scientists to predict group rather than individual behavior. (“Most engaged couple will get married.”)

OBSERVATION

• Compare a geologist studying rocks to a psychologist studying a person’s behavior.

• In the natural sciences, the observer is not the same as what is being observed. The human sciences, of course, involve people observing people.

• Imagine that a TV station crew is coming to our class tomorrow to film a typical TOK class. How would this affect your behavior?

• This is known as the observer effect/Hawthorne effect – when people change their behavior when aware of being observed. It’s one inevitable result of humans studying humans. Can you think of another example of the observer effect?

• To what extent do you think your teachers’ expectations about your abilities affect how well you do in school?

CONFIRMATION BIAS

• Can you think of examples of confirmation bias?• Since all scientists are human, they can all be

influences by their emotions and biases. Does this apply more to human sciences than natural sciences?

• We are more likely to be prejudices about the nature of individuals & societies than about the nature of atoms and molecules.

• The solution?• Actively explore different perspectives.

MEASUREMENTS

• It’s generally more difficult to measure things in the human sciences than in the natural sciences. For example: Can you count how many thoughts you had today?

• How can you measure happiness? • Can you put a monetary value on human

life? • But – there’s much more reliance on

quantitative studies in the human sciences today, data, statistics.

Polls & Questionnaires

• From a US poll (1980):Do you think there should be an amendment to the Constitution prohibiting abortions, or shouldn’t there be such an amendment? - In favor 29%, Opposed 67%

Do you believe there should be an amendment to the Constitution protecting the life of the unborn child, or shouldn’t there be such an amendment? - In favor 50%, Opposed 34%

• Loaded questions contain hidden suggestions and use language to influence.

HOLISM & CONTEXT

• Human beings can be best understood in their context

• The whole is different from the sum of its parts• Holism is the view that systems can only be

understood if viewed as a whole, not as a collection of different items; a group has a special character, different from any of its members. Your thoughts?

• Sports teams, classes, families, armies, nations…

Psychology

• What is it? • Study of the behavior and mental processes of

individuals and groups.• Personality psychology & social psychology• Literally it means what?• “study of the soul”• How do psychologist study other people?• Let’s talk about some famous experiments• Let’s watch “How we read each other's minds?” http://

www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments

The Asch conformity experiments, published in 1951, were a series of social psychology studies that

demonstrated the power of conformity in groups.

What were the results of the Asch experiment?

• About 75% of participants conformed at least once when asked a few questions

• In the control group, with no pressure to conform, less than 1% of participants gave the wrong answer.

• When asked why, most said out of fear of standing out (not because they really believed).

• However, when the group answer was not unanimous, conformity dropped considerably.

• One limitation of the study is that is used a biased sample. All the participants were male college students who all belonged to the same age group. This means that study lacks population validity and that the results cannot be generalized to females or older groups of people.

OBEDIENCE (FOLLOWING ORDERS)

• The Milgram experiment (1961) was a famous scientific experiment of social psychology.

• It was intended to measure the willingness of a participant to obey an authority who instructs the participant to do something that may conflict with the participant's personal conscience.

The experimenter (E) persuades the participant

(S) to give what the participant believes are

painful electric shocks to a “learner” (A), who is

actually an actor. If the answer was incorrect, the

learner would receive a shock, with the voltage

increasing with each wrong answer.

If at any time a participant indicated his desire to stop, he was given a succession of commands by the experimenter:- Please continue. - The experiment requires you to continue, please go on. - It is essential that you continue. - You have no choice, you must continue.

The participants believed that the “learner” was receiving actual shocks and could hear the screams.

What were the results?

• 65 % of the participants administered the experiment's final 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable in doing so; everyone paused at some point and questioned the experiment.

• The experiment was later performed by Milgram and other psychologists around the world (but all Western countries) with similar results.

• Some concerns regarding the experiment: lab conditions, all were males, responding to ads; ethical issues

Let’s watch “How we read each other's minds?” – Ted talk

http://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments

APPROACHES IN PSYCHOLOGY

Behaviorism

• One of the approaches in psychology - that psychologists should study only observable events (behavior). In practice this means focusing on public events (behaviors of the individual) while ignoring private events (thoughts of the individual)

• Connected to the belief that behaviors are shaped by the conditions in our environments and by punishments and rewards.

• Example in therapy – behavior management techniques, counting to relieve anxiety, systematic desensitization for phobias (step-by-step exposed to feared stimulus at once)

Classical conditioning – Pavlov’s dog experiments - https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=qG2SwE_6uVM 2:40

Social Learning Theory

• People learn from others - via observation, imitation, and modeling.

• Bandura’s Bobo doll experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=128Ts5r9NRE only first 2 min

• Where do these two approaches stand in the nature-nurture debate?

• The debate whether our genes or our environment mostly impacts our development.

Biological/physiological approach

• believes that most behavior is inherited and has an adaptive (or evolutionary) function

• For example biological psychologists believe that schizophrenia is affected by levels of dopamine (a neurotransmitter)

• Study the brain, blood tests, genes, etc.• Applications - used by psychiatrists when

treating mental illness with drugs, etc.

Cross-cultural Approach

• Studies the influence of cultural and ethnic influences on human psychological functioning

• Cultural differences in diagnosing and treatment – for example, how students’ levels of test anxiety are dependent on their cultural values.

• Example to read – cultural differences in approaching schizophrenia (see pdf)

Freudian psychoanalysis

• The belief that our behavior is determined by the unconscious mind and childhood experiences.

• Let’s watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUELAiHbCxc (start at 2:40)

• Our feelings, motives and decisions are powerfully influenced by our past experiences, stored in the unconscious.

• The unconscious hides threatening things, usually related to aggressiveness & sex

• Many expressions come from Freud's theories of psychoanalysis - subconscious, denial, repression

• Freud used three main methods of accessing the unconscious - free association (relax and say whatever comes to your mind), slips of the tongue/Freudian slips (“I’m mad you’re here.”), and dream analysis.

• Psychotherapy, hypnosis, etc.

DREAMS• Freud’s theory of dreams - that dreams reflect our secret,

guilt-ridden and anxiety-provoking desires into dreams… so dream interpretation is a way to understand our unconscious.

• Most modern-day psychologists believe that dreams reflect our everyday experiences and concerns.

• Biological approach – based on brain scans during sleep – concluded that areas involved in reasoning are shut down, which allows the areas involved in emotions and visual images to take over our brain.

• Cross-cultural approach – the Inuit believe that you enter the spiritual world through dreams.

• Fun fact – there’s and annual Association for the study of Dreams (psychologists, anthropologists, artists, etc.)

Humanistic Approach• Every individual has the

free will to change at any time in his or her life, and is responsible for doing this

• We have the innate/inborn capacity for self-actualization which is our unique desire to achieve our highest potential as people.

• The most well known theory within this approach is Maslow’s.

• Everyone should try to reach their own potential.

• Counseling, help from teachers, etc.Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Abel reading “The Social Sciences” Let’s read the intro together.

Read, discuss with a partner, write, share out.

In the section “Claims of the Verstehen Position,” Abel argues that social sciences are really NOT so different from the natural sciences. Summarize in your own words 1) one of Abel’s 12 arguments and 2) what you think about this argument. Write this down in your journals like this:

What Abel says in his claim #....

What we think about Abel’s argument in this claim