Human Biases, Social Science, and Collective Political Knowledge

• In Event: Men as They Might Be? Democratic Theory Meets Political Psychology

Abstract

Social science is a collective enterprise to learn about and explain human beings’ interactions and their joint development of social life. Compared to natural sciences, the classic problems of social science have been (1) that we are studying ourselves and others who can respond to the information we learn and (2) that social practices are both aggregations of complex biological entities and consequences of the particular histories, cultures, and high-level social institutions that humans have created. Under these circumstances, social scientists are particularly vulnerable to anthropocentric, presentist, psychological, and cultural biases in the questions we ask, our research practices, and our interpretations of results. In conducting social science, we are helping to determine how we see ourselves and the world we want to create. That introduces corrupting motivations for research well beyond understanding or explaining.

Social studies of science have taught us a lot about how the national, racial, gender, class, and political biases of scientists—and of scientific cultures—have influenced our historical and contemporary research. But that project is made easier by the diversification of social scientists, with minority group scholars who can uncover alternative interpretations and the cultural roots of dominant understandings. When it comes to human biases that we all share, there is no possible “view from nowhere” and no view from another species to add perspective. Yet I argue that an archeology of social science knowledge based on an inventory of likely human biases is both possible and necessary for understanding the progress and limitations of social science. For social scientists, this provides some justification for focusing on our own species, our own time period, our own communities, our own disciplines, and our own industry—but only if we are attentive to the particularities of our non-scientific motivations at each stage. Using the recent history of political science as a case, I review common human researcher biases, their potential impacts, and successful efforts to overcome them. Political science builds on all of the other social sciences and addresses arguably the highest-level social entities, nation-states and international arrangements.

I undertake an inventory of fields of knowledge useful to this enterprise, including sociology and history of social science, sociology of knowledge, and social studies of science but also methodological critiques of social science and statistical practice and the psychological and political biases of researchers, and apply their findings to contemporary political science research practices and the role of political science in public debate and policymaking. Despite drawing from critiques of science, it is a realist project acknowledging tremendous recent advances in social science, including political science. Drawing lessons applicable across disciplines, I find that 1) the specific histories and motivations of mainstream social science disciplines account for many ongoing differences in emphasis within and across them, 2) much social science is still infected by the motivations of practice: the desire to do something to change the world, rather than understand it, 3) the popularization of findings for debates across disciplines and with practitioners tend to highlight researcher biases, and 4) calls for consilience based on naturalism or interdisciplinarity are misguided; it is better to understand and attempt to correct for our specific biases. Even though we have not recognized the source of recent social science progress, much has come internalizing and addressing our human biases. The responses to the reproducibility crisis, the causal inference revolution, the expansion of representative data across more societies and time scales, studies of the role of the social factors of researchers, the rise of international co-authorship, the institutional responses to publication biases, and the incorporation of theory from multiple disciplinary and political perspectives have all improved recent social understanding.

Author

• Matt Grossmann, Michigan State University