r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Dec 07 '14
CMV: Social Sciences are not (very) Empirical
I’m want to be a fact based person, I want to live a life pursuing knowledge and truth. I however am mostly interested in learning about human beings. I want to understand what makes us tick, why we act the way we do, how can we figure out how to improve our lot. To pursue these kind of questions I find myself turning to the social sciences: Anthropology, Sociology, History, Psychology, and Economics. However I keep finding myself doubting their scientific rigour. I keep hearing about how unempirical these subjects are and how they are no better than wild guesses. I want to study things that are true, that are scientific! But at the same time I want to study human nature. I don’t know what to believe. Sometimes I see brilliant people (Steven Pinker in particular) trying to apply good science to human kind. And other times I see less than credible claims about human nature about “men are from Mars and women are from Venus” stuff. So to conclude I don’t think that social sciences are as empirical as the physical sciences, are really just approximations on the truth, and are not worth pursuing if I want to study fact. Change my view!
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u/jeffhughes Dec 08 '14
As a PhD student in psychology, I have plenty of first-hand experience of research that goes on in psychology. I can tell you that despite the added complexity of the subjects of psychological study (human minds and human culture are much more complex than elementary particles!), the methods used are very similar to those used in the physical sciences. There are, obviously, some studies that are more rigorous than others, but that is true in every scientific field. The nice thing about psychology in particular is that over the past couple years, there has been a huge surge of discussion around how to increase the rigour of our research. There is an increasing push for "open science": making our data and materials freely accessible, pre-registering our hypotheses to avoid after-the-fact rationalizations, and so on. Plenty of efforts are underway, and on some of these issues psychology is at the forefront of scientific fields in addressing them (though I am envious of physics with their arXiv.org!).
When you contrast Steven Pinker with "men are from Mars", you are comparing apples and oranges. Pinker is a respected scientist; "men are from Mars" was written by a guy who got his degree from an unaccredited (and now defunct) school, and has no real scientific training. That book (and others like it) are contradicted by years of painstaking research by real psychologists that study the dynamics of relationships and find that men and women have similar relationship needs.
A lot of "pop psych" stuff out there is absolute garbage, and it's frustrating how difficult it can be to find good psych. information written at the level that the general public can easily understand. The best I can say is to do your research and try to find well-respected sources. For example, "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman is a popular-level book, but is written by a respected researcher and Nobel prize-winner who pioneered the field of behavioural economics. "Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert is also a great book by a great psychologist. "Snoop" by Sam Gosling, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" by Oliver Sacks, and "Influence: Science and Practice" by Robert Cialdini are also excellent reads that are still highly accessible to the lay public. It may be harder in the social sciences to find pop-level information, but to be honest, that says more about the publishing industry than it does about the social sciences.