To what extent can the scientific method be successfully applied to humans? Give specific examples of your answer and refer to the TED talk of Steven Pinker.
I have to admit this TED talk by Steven Pinker, contradicted a lot of what I believe was true about why humans have singular and different behaviours between each other. He supports the idea that what actually shapes our emotions, reactions and our ways of behaving is not the environment we have been raised in, but instead, our genetics. At first, I was quite unsure of this but then he pointed out some ideas and examples in support of his theory that I found interesting :
- Anthropology tells us that there are hundreds of behaviours in common between all the human cultures.
- Neurobiology studies measuring the distribution of grey matters in family-related people and unrelated-family people show that the there are a lot more similarities in the brain structure and distribution of grey matter between family related subjects than unrelated subjects.
- He brings up then, an example of two twins divided at birth, explaining how (after having been living separately from each other all their life) they show so many similarities in terms of behaviour, hobbies, fashion choices and tastes, as well as other aspects. He links this example with another one that presents a pair of adoptive twins showing the same behaviours and attitudes between each other but very different from the ones of their adoptive parents, with who they have been living all their life.
Steven Pinker really thinks that the sciences of human nature such as behavioural genetics, evolutionary psychology and neuroscience will lead to a better understanding of human nature. He supports the fact that, these natural sciences applied to the human mind, can explain a lot of what we only see happening at the moment in the years to come.
In any case, I think that a scientific approach to human science can be effective only until a certain point.
Let’s take as example a person who is unsatisfied with the election of the new first minister of his/her country. Our purpose is to understand why this person is unsatisfied with the result, using the scientific method. First of all, we observe this person before and after the day of the proclamation of the winner. Based on what observed, a hypothesis is formulated. After the hypothesis formulation, a test is carried to evaluate and measure the subject’s reactions to different opinions and statement said by the neo president about various topics, starting from education until immigration. Based on the intensity of the subject’s reactions, a conclusion is formulated explaining the reason behind of her discontentment. This final conclusion can confirm the initial hypothesis or instead deny the first presupposition.
In this method there are a lot of factors that can not be controlled at all:
- the subject may dislike the winning candidate not because of his ideas but instead for his appearance and his way of speaking or presenting himself.
- the subject’s reactions to different statements can be influenced by thousands of reasons. These reactions are products of different reasonings combined, therefore they can not be classified and labelled just as one.
- Subject’s social and cultural background.
What Steven Pinker explained in his speech I think is a big generalisation of human behaviours. He is grouping cultures, races and societies not considering the individual will. In human sciences, every case is a world apart (contrary to natural sciences where finding common features between phenomena helps formulate a hypothesis to explain them) and even if similarities can be found, generalisations really cover and distract from the point of understanding human action. Anyway, I believe that generalisations need to be made in order to try to explain patterns among behaviour and cultures. In this case, the scientific method could turn to be helpful to understand the bigger picture but I think it can not be applied to singular humans because of their unpredictability that stop the scientific method to be effective since it presuppositions cannot be made.
As a conclusion , Steven Pinker quotes Anton Chekhov “Man will become batter when you show him what he is like”. I am not sure I agree with this: Is showing to the man what he is really like a way for him to improve and progress? And if so, what will this progress consist in?
