Human Nature

These are my thoughts about human nature: We share 99.9% of the same DNA, and some of that DNA made up our brains. Our personality, our thoughts, and our behavior are all a function of the physical structure of that brain. So yes, there's a lot of common ground here. Someone already pointed out just how much common psychology it takes to create a collective language and then have meaningful conversations in it.

However, just because we do have very similar psychology, and this means that there probably is a "human nature", doesn't meant that every armchair philosopher completely understands it. You wouldn't trust anyone but a zoologists to give you an accurate picture of the nature of lions, and you shouldn't trust anyone but a psychologist or neurologist to (try to) give you an accurate picture of humans.

The presence of several universals and similarities throughout humanity suggest that if full fledged experiments, based on isolating very precise aspects of human behavior were conducted, there may be some possibility that elements of human behavior could fall into a consistent range of predictability and quantification, even on a more massive sociological scale including vast numbers of individuals.

Due to moral, ethical, and logistical concerns, however, there have been few if any attempts at more rigorous, objective experiments of this nature.

Presently, most of what we know on the topic has been derived from what are essentially case studies carried out through fields such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, economics, etc.

There has been some more concrete progress in the last several decades in the form of neurological experiments, but since these experiments often lack the complete isolation of the many environmental factors present in a human's life, the results have yielded insights that are less precise and accurate than what might be achieved through more isolated behavioral experiments.

But if there's one thing we know about humans, it's how much they depend on their environment to stay sane - not just the things around them, but the people, too. Truly trying to isolate them from environmental factors would probably have them display brutal behavior that humans in society do not. Now, I guess you could argue that this brutality is the "real" human nature, but I would disagree.

Also, it's extremely difficult, of course, to create controlled experiments on ourselves - not only are there moral questions, there are also practical ones. It's kind of like a blind spot - we haven't ever observed humans from an objective standpoint, so we wouldn't have any idea what kind of controlled experiments to do, and we wouldn't get an idea until we conduct experiments. It's the Catch-22 of behavioral psychology.

Cognitive psychology and neurology have made some head-way, though - they at least have something to measure. But it's mostly been in the field of what physical changes in the brain correspond to emotional states or actions - dopamine is released when we're feeling pleasure, adrenaline when we are experiencing fight-or-flight response, etc. It hasn't made any progress on the general patterns of behavior themselves.

edited 21st Jul '11 10:17:27 AM by OnTheOtherHandle

As I said, there are moral, ethical, and logistical issues.

However, the point is that using case studies primarily as the means of identifying traits of human behavior is...well, frankly it's unscientific as long as it only gives us vague results. But considering the nature of the experiments that would need to be carried out, this is one of those things where a scientist must agree that sometimes being unscientific may possibly be better for human society (although I'm sure it's an issue that could be put up to some debate).

I'm also certain that an individual put through a study more rigorously designed to isolate and define aspects of their behavior as they development would indeed turn out brutally different from the way most normal humans develop. That is part of the reason there are so many moral and ethical boundaries that could be crossed if the matter was pursued.

For instance, if you wanted to learn the extent to which language is innate as a human behavior, the most efficient way to discern this would be to take a sufficient sample of human children, hopefully taking into account genetic factors or factors from pregnancy before their birth, etc, stratify them into groups, take them into an isolated environment, and teach all the groups in different ways in regards to language.

Of course, there would need to be a control group that was not taught language in any way at all.

...

There are indeed far more factors than that to account for, but my point is that such isolated experiments could be designed to achieve some very precise quantification of human behavior. Even if the first wave of these experiments were a little unspecific, they could easily build on each other as more and more isolated variables are derived, giving a near guarantee that it would move the body of data forward more concretely than what we're attempting now.

Case studies have their place, and can be very important in bridging the gap between isolated experiments, and more practical, immersed events as they occur directly in reality. They can also be of immense help in figuring out better ways to design experiments more likely to reflect actual conditions.

But moving forward without more effective experiments is the scientific equivalent of driving without all of the cylinders.

...

Still, many of these experiments would have a horrific impact on the humans that went through them.

And the information learned may have the potential to be used in some extremely frightening ways, even as it could stand to improve our society in ways that some might argue would even offset the harm inflicted upon individuals abused by them.

It's a pretty tricky can of worms.

edited 21st Jul '11 1:52:31 PM by Toodle

It's not just the fact that such experiments would hurt them, but also that they necessarily have to be done without consent - because if you don't have them in this isolated environment from infancy, then it's not a controlled experiment anymore. Scientific rigor demands that you take infants from their homes to do this experiment on them. Yeah...I think we should stick to the MRI scans and make do with that.

edited 21st Jul '11 2:55:19 PM by OnTheOtherHandle