Empirical?

After a rather unproductive day I decided to go out to get some fresh air, and caffeine before settleing down to get some serious work done on a few assignments. 9pm was probably not the most advisable hour to be ordering a triple grande white mocha, but it did have the desired effect of getting my brain working again. Lately whenever I get a beverage from Starbucks, the same “The Way I See It” quote has been featured on the side of my cup, however today’s was new. Here is what my cup says:

“A very bad (and all too common) way
to misread a newspaper: To see
whatever suports your point of view
as fact, and anything that contradicts
your point of view as bias.”

-Daniel Okrent
Ombudsman

Upon reading it, I realize that this faux-pas applies to much more than reading the newspaper. This year especially, I’ve found fault with quite a few scholars and the work they publish, and this very Monday afternoon I found myself getting all riled up in a discussion with a professor and several fellow students in a seminar course about the validity of evidence that had been cited in a paper published in a fairly prestigious scientific journal. It seems surprisingly common in multiple disciplines these days for researchers to conveniently overlook outlying values, or evidence that doesn’t support their hypothesis claiming they’re merely an anomaly or unique case; or choosing statistical tests in such a way that “supports their theory” at first glance, when really it was never the appropriate test to be using in the first place!

The trouble continues to compound itself as new research is based upon flawed or heavily biased results. In a similar fashion to a game of telephone, “groundbreaking theories” are proved or disproved based on biased results, whose research methodology was designed based on just as flawed and biased (if not more so) previously published work; and in our quest for knowledge and awareness of ourselves and the world around us we get further and further from the truth.

This brings me to my second qualm, which is that there may not be any concrete “truth” (or rather discrete definable conditions as opposed to continuums with a broad range of variation) to discover! No matter what field of study one is engaged in, there are important considerations that need to be taken into account that cannot necessarily be properly addressed from an ego-centric theoretical perspective. Among social scientists and psychologists there is a tendency to picture the current state of affairs as an end-point of evolution. They may state in their introduction that evolution is a continuous process, with physiology and behaviour being shaped by selective processes dependent on the environment, however they then proceed to attribute any correlations in the data collected to genetically determined biologically based mechanisms. The “environment” may as well cease to exist- or at least any variation within their simplistically defined environment, that is. They also love to say that the human mind was formed during the hunting and gathering stage of our ancestry. Sure biological evolution lags considerably behind cultural- but just how and when do you suggest we are going to adapt to current (or at least more recent) environmental conditions?

The methods according to which they collect the data are even biased to collect supporting evidence only. For example; in a paper aiming to prove a genetically inherited neural mechanism responsible for kin selection and incest aversion, does it really make sense to collect data from self-report surveys after stating that one of the principles according to which evolutionary psychology works is that humans have “instinct blindness” (whereby we aren’t aware of any subconscious motivations designed to promote genetic proliferation)? How can your theory be proved by people telling you about something that they shouldn’t even be aware of according to that very theory?! Kind of ironic.. don’t you think?

I’m not suggesting that research should never be conducted or reported unless every variable is controlled for; because in fields concerning human biology and human nature, it is usually unethical (if not impossible) to design such an experiment. I just think that people need to take the possible sources of error into consideration, and let their evidence speak for itself rather than making excuses for the aspects that don’t fully support the hypothesis. Sure it’s not nearly as exciting to have your hypothesis disproved, and much harder to get anything published if you’ve been proven wrong- but at least we have more questions to ask, and sound metholodology with which to proceed.