By researching facts, using the scientific method, you are never sure that the results you are going to find will please or upset you. Cause the method makes abstraction of the emotional stuff. It is not meant to make you feel good or bad. It is meant to help in the most accurate understanding of reality (which is sometimes a very hard pill to swallow).
How then could the method be used to address social affairs, when most of our daily interactions are the results of our emotions?
I believe the solution to this problem, lies in the definition of Emotion. As soon as we can get a clear empirical definition of human emotions, integrating social affairs with the scientific method will become kid stuff.
What is an Emotion?
The Encyclopedia definition reads :
Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical (internal) and environmental (external) influences
Emotions whatever it really is, are triggered either or by both, your internal biochemical status and/or by your environment. So this is internal chemistry vs environment.
e. g :
- If you are surrounded by your family, you might feel protected.
- If you haven't eaten in 3 days, you might feel sad.
It always comes down to, your internal chemical status vs your external stimuli s.
So now that we know what are our emotions, or at least what causes us to feel how we feel let see how we could use the scientific method to guide our social life accordingly.
The Scientific Method
The scientific method consist of as little as 4 principle to be applied in regard to every situation of life.
1) Using your experience : What do you know about the current situation?
2) Form a conjecture: (When you know nothing or very little about a situation or phenomena): Try to explain using logic the situation.
3) Deduce explanation: This means you have to make a prediction. in case your conjecture is correct.
4) Test to disprove your conjecture : Make observations and tests of the situation to attempt to prove that your conjecture is wrong, when a hole is found, modify your conjecture, deduce another explanation and run tests again.
------------------------------------------------------
Let apply the scientific method to two hypothetical social situations
Situation 1 : You are a young lady and just met with a stranger, that ask a favor (A request for a date for example) from you, he is pretty good looking and you feel interested.
1) Use your experience : What past experience have you had with dating complete strangers in the past?
2) Form a conjecture : Complete strangers might not be interested in you but rather in just exploiting you one way or the other. (Remember that you just made a conjecture which might be true or wrong)
2) Deduce explanation : In the current situation if you accepted a date with this stranger and he is the wrong type he would require you to have sex within the month. (You just made a prediction)
3) Test to disprove your conjecture : Make observations, and tests to see if anything goes against your conjecture. In this case you might notice that he never made any mention of your physical appearance. That would go against your conjecture. Or you never maybe caught he eyes focusing on anything else but your face. All of these elements tend to disprove your conjecture. But you might also watch for the elements that tend to support your conjecture.
As the experiment goes on, modify the conjecture as much as needed. Until you feel comfortable enough.
Situation 2: You are a young men, just met with a lady, that seem different, as she is the one approaching you rather that you going to her. that is intriguing, but she is pretty good looking and you feel interested.
1) Use your experience : What past experience have you had with ladies that came to you rather than you going to her?
2) Form a conjecture : She might be after your money (if you are wealthy) or she might be seeking to use you a way or another.
3) Deduce explanation : Outside of hanging out, to the restaurant, where you might pay for the bill, she will call you, requesting financial assistance to solve a family or personal problem within the month.
4) Test to disprove your conjecture: Look for any sign that might prove you wrong to begin with. for example, maybe after your first date, she insisted for you to share the bill. This might go against your original conjecture, and you might have to need to modify it, and repeat the experiment until you feel comfortable enough to draw the most probable conclusions.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here you go. The scientific method has just been applied to two hypothetical social situations. Why did i choose dating in particular? Because this is usually a situation of heavy emotional involvement. But as you can see, the scientific method can provide accurate results to you if you decide to use it.
What are the greatest barriers to using the scientific method in social affairs?
Ego, and Poor Self Esteem which are two extreme positions to avoid at all cost.
Ego
Now, Ego is another story. An extremely inflated ego, usually fails to reason. Ego is a religion of self. The belief that somehow you ought to deserve more, or be better, than anything and anyone else.
If you introduce an exaggerated ego, in the experiment results might be flawed. Ego leads to denial of reality, and will prevent you to see the obvious stuff. It is important to know yourself very well. and to understand the most important, thing which is :
"you are not better than any human being alive, and the laws of nature will apply to you, just as much as they apply to anyone else. And this is true for both the physical world and also in all social affairs."
Poor Self Esteem
Whatever results you come up with using the scientific method in social affair, you might actually refuse to acknowledge your logically found conclusions, because it is just too good for you. A very poor self esteem will also lead you to denial of the real.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The scientific method do not claim to provide absolute truth, and that is not even the purpose of the exercise. But it is a method that will help you have the most accurate result you can achieve using the tools, and understanding you currently posses. The most important is also, that if applied a significant amount of times, past errors are always sure to be corrected, and never repeated.
No comments:
Post a Comment