Human Science: Perspective | Quomodo Scimus : IBTOK

areas of knowledge - human science

Perspective in Human Science

Whose account of human behaviour counts as knowledge - and whose gets left out?

A Line Someone Drew

THE PROVOCATION

In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt opened a small laboratory in Leipzig and called what happened inside it psychology. Before that date, questions about perception and the workings of the mind belonged to philosophy, the same discipline that also claimed logic and questions about right and wrong. Wundt drew a new line through territory philosophy had always occupied, and the line held: psychology has been its own discipline, with its own journals and its own professorships, ever since.

The same thing happened to sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science, all 'invented' at about the same time, each splitting off from a wider field of inquiry within a few decades of the others, each claiming its own slice of the same underlying subject: people, living together, doing things for reasons. None of those lines was drawn by nature. They were drawn by particular people, at particular (often new) universities, making a case that their slice deserved its own department, journal and funding.

None of this makes the disciplines arbitrary. Wundt's department line, and the lines drawn after him, held because they turned out to be useful: each new department found real, distinctive questions to ask that the old, wider field had been asking badly or not at all. But useful and true are not the same thing, and a division that works well enough to survive for a century and a half is still a division somebody chose to make, not one the world handed over ready-made.

Big idea 1 - You are probably WEIRD

In 1925, aged twenty-three, Margaret Mead travelled alone to Samoa to answer a question almost nobody in psychology had thought to ask: was the emotional turmoil of adolescence, assumed at the time to be a universal biological stage, actually universal, or was it something Western culture produced and then mistook for human nature? She found Samoan adolescence calm by comparison, and her 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa became one of the most widely read works of social science ever published, decades before anyone had a name for the problem she had put her finger on. Her fieldwork was pioneering in its own right, and it later became the target of a famous attack, detailed in the AOK Key Thinker box on this page.

Joseph Henrich gave that problem a name and a scale Mead could not have had access to. He opens The WEIRDest People in the World with a direct address to the reader: "Perhaps you are WEIRD, raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic." Most of what psychology calls universal human behaviour, from visual perception to moral reasoning to a stable sense of self, was built almost entirely from research on people who fit that acronym, a small and unusual slice of humanity.

Henrich's own fieldwork makes the problem concrete in exactly the way Mead's did for adolescence. In the Ultimatum Game, one person is given a sum of money and proposes how to split it with a stranger; the stranger can accept or reject the split, and if they reject it, both people get nothing. Among WEIRD populations this produces a strikingly consistent result: people reliably reject low offers, willing to lose money themselves rather than accept an unfair split, a finding so stable it was treated as a basic fact about human fairness. Among the Matsigenka of the Peruvian Amazon, Henrich found people readily accepted offers that participants in Los Angeles would reject as insultingly low. The finding that looked like a fact about human fairness turned out to be a fact about WEIRD fairness specifically.

You have probably taken part in a version of the Ultimatum Game without ever calling it that, deciding whether a split, a favour, or a request feels fair enough to accept. Henrich's point is that a science built almost entirely from people who share your background could never actually tell you whether that sense of fairness is human, or just familiar to you. Mead was already asking the same thing about adolescence, a century before the acronym existed to describe it.

Big idea 2 - Do the categories describe you, or produce you?

For most of the nineteenth century, "hysteria" was a standard medical diagnosis: fits, paralyses, and symptoms doctors could not explain physically, understood almost exclusively as a female condition. Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria tried to explain it as repressed trauma rather than a defect of the womb, which was progress, but the category itself outlived their explanation of it. It survived as a diagnosis until the DSM finally dropped it in 1980.

The First World War produced the same fits, paralyses, and mutism in men under bombardment. The historian Elaine Showalter argues the label had to change once the symptoms crossed into men: "Only when hysteria, under the new name it was given during the war, became a widespread malady of men did the talking cure enter English psychiatric practice. Not feminism but shell shock initiated the era of psychiatric modernism." Because the symptoms did not fit the category of a physical wound, many army courts read them as a moral failure instead. 306 British and Commonwealth soldiers were executed during the war for offences including desertion and cowardice, men whose breakdowns are now understood to have been a psychological response to sustained bombardment rather than a lack of nerve. Britain pardoned all 306 in 2006. The condition they had was given its present clinical name, post-traumatic stress disorder, only in 1980, the same year the DSM dropped hysteria. Which category you were assigned, in 1860 or in 1916, decided whether you were treated or shot.

Naming rarely stays neutral for long. A clinical term absorbs the judgment attached to the condition it names, and eventually the term itself becomes the insult. "Hysterical" started as a diagnosis and is now an accusation you would not want levelled at you in an argument. Education has its own version of this. "Remedial" entered schooling in the nineteenth century from the Latin for cure, a plain description of extra support for a specific gap. You have probably heard it used as a synonym for stupid long before you ever heard what it originally meant. Many schools have quietly replaced it with "developmental" for exactly this reason, though that word is already drifting the same way.

Classification does not only work in this direction. In 1998, the Australian sociologist Judy Singer, who is autistic herself, coined the word neurodiversity in her university thesis, deliberately echoing "biodiversity" to describe autism, dyslexia, and ADHD as differences in wiring rather than defects. The condition itself did not change. What changed was which category held it: from disorder, measured against a single standard of normal, to variation, one way among others for a brain to work.

You already met a version of this in Core Lesson 1. Howard Gardner's argument there was that no single genius invents anything alone, and the evidence he used was that intelligence is not one thing you can catch in a single score, it is several different things a person can have in different combinations. The same move that broke apart a single IQ number into multiple intelligences is the move Singer made to psychiatric diagnosis: not one deficit scale, but several different, equally valid ways of being classified.

Human science cannot avoid classifying, and diagnosis is one of its most consequential forms of classification. What a category does once it exists rarely stays fixed in one direction, and it rarely stays where it started. The same act of naming confined the woman labelled hysterical and the soldier labelled a coward, and widened things for neurodiversity. Who controlled the name, and what they wanted it to do, decided which way it went.

Big idea 3 - What happens when one perspective becomes so dominant that it stops appearing to be a perspective at all?

Economics is a powerful example of this in the human sciences, because it often presents historically specific arrangements as if they were natural laws. Markets, wages, competition, growth, scarcity, and rational choice can appear as neutral facts about human life, when they are also categories produced within particular institutions and power relations. The ideological function of economics is not necessarily to deceive. It is to make one social order appear realistic, rational, and inevitable. Alternative perspectives then struggle to be heard, not because they lack evidence, but because they challenge the framework that decides what counts as economic knowledge in the first place. This takes back to Gramsci and his ideas of 'common sense' and 'hegemony' that we first saw in Core Lesson 4.

The infographic sets out the mechanism using one number everyone treats as neutral: GDP. What follows is where its claims actually come from.

Start with what the "hides" column leaves out. Cooking, cleaning, and caring for children or elderly relatives are not counted in GDP at all, even though, as Ha-Joon Chang notes, economists have a standing joke that "you reduce your national output if you marry your housekeeper." Because most of that unpaid work is done by women, Chang writes, "women's work is grossly under-valued as a result of this practice," worth an estimated 30 percent of GDP and present in none of the figures. Yanis Varoufakis explains why this kind of value goes missing: economics treats anything with what he calls experiential value, a dive, a sunset, a joke, as worthless unless it also carries exchange value, a price someone would pay for it. "These two types of values," he writes, "couldn't be more different from one another," yet GDP only ever measures the second kind. The oil-spill paradox in the infographic is real and specific: the clean-up after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill added around two billion dollars to US GDP, because clean-up work has a price and an intact coastline does not. Mariana Mazzucato extends the same argument to entire sectors, not just individual acts of unpaid work. Government spending on roads, schools, and research is treated in the national accounts as a cost rather than a contribution, while a rise in incomes in the financial sector counts as growth regardless of what produced it. Her own question, from the book's acknowledgements, is the one this whole page is asking in miniature: "Are we sure that much of what is passing for value creation is not just value extraction in disguise?"

The "common sense" panel has a real theoretical source, not just a label. Gramsci's own definition is precise: "common sense is a collective noun, like religion... there is not just one common sense, for that too is a product of history and a part of the historical process." Common sense, in his sense of the term, is a perspective that has finished the job of hiding itself. Marx gives the same mechanism its sharpest statement in The German Ideology: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas... The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas." His own example is the separation of powers, which, he writes, in the right conditions gets "expressed as an 'eternal law'." Free trade is the modern version: not one policy choice among several, but an economic law as fixed as gravity, right up until it stops suiting whoever wrote it.

Ha-Joon Chang shows exactly how selectively that law gets applied. Look at two developing economies: heavy tariffs, state-owned banks, discrimination against foreign investors, weak protection of intellectual property, a government riddled with corruption and no functioning democracy. Country A turns out to be China today. Country B turns out to be the United States, around 1880, when it was poorer than China is now. Every policy the IMF, the World Bank, and the US Treasury now tell developing countries to drop, tariffs, subsidies, restrictions on foreign capital, is a policy the US and Britain used to get rich in the first place. Free trade became the "eternal law" only once the countries writing the rule no longer needed to break it themselves.

The theory enforcing that rule is also, on its own terms, in trouble. Mainstream economics did not see the 2008 financial crisis coming, and its central assumptions, that people act as rational, self-interested calculators and that markets self-correct, are increasingly doubted by economists working inside the discipline, not just its critics outside it. Kate Raworth is one of the clearest voices arguing the model itself, not just its predictions, needs to change: "Today we have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive; what we need are economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow." Core Lesson 5 already gave you a name for this situation: a paradigm defended by the institutions that depend on it, at the exact moment its own predictions are failing. Kuhn's account of how an establishment resists the evidence against it was written about physics. Economics may be living through it now.

The perspective of Human Science compared

Whose sample, whose diagnosis, whose economics: when does a description stop looking like one?

History's Perspectives page already asks a version of this question about the past: whose account gets told, and whose disappears into what Trouillot calls the silences of the archive. This page asks the same question about the present. Henrich's WEIRD sample shows psychology built its account of "human nature" almost entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic subjects, the same exclusion History's Perspectives page already names in whose stories get archived and taught. Diagnosis extends the problem inward: hysteria, shell shock, and the drift of "remedial" into an insult all show that when a discipline names a condition, it is also deciding who has to live inside that name, and Judy Singer's neurodiversity shows the same naming power can run the other way. Economics extends the problem furthest of all, hiding a perspective so completely inside the words "growth" and "GDP" that it stops being recognisable as one.

Mathematics's Perspectives page asks whether numbers are discovered or invented, a dispute about the nature of the objects themselves. Natural Science's Perspectives page asks who funds and institutionally shapes what counts as a valid test. Human Science asks something different from both. Not whether the object of study is real, and not who is allowed to look at it, but whether a discipline's description of people can ever be separated from the interests of whoever built it. A sample, a diagnosis, and an economic model are three different kinds of description. Each one turned out to describe less than it claimed, and to serve someone more specific than "everyone" while doing it.

Perspective in the Arts asks a related question in a domain where the answer is least contested: institutions, identity, and cultural training openly decide what counts as a serious or beautiful work, and nobody expects otherwise. Human Science’s problem is that this same mechanism operates inside a discipline that presents its findings as neutral. A gallery admits that taste is trained. A psychology study built entirely on WEIRD subjects usually does not admit it was only ever describing one culture.

Next: Methods and Tools in Human Science

Think further: questions and resources

Henrich shows that most of what psychology calls universal human behaviour was tested almost entirely on WEIRD populations, a small and unusual slice of humanity. If a genuinely representative sample of the world's population contradicted a "universal" finding, would psychology need a new theory, or would it need a new definition of what counts as normal?
Judy Singer coined "neurodiversity" to reframe conditions like autism and ADHD as differences rather than disorders. Does reframing a category as a difference risk understating real difficulties some people face, or is that risk worth accepting for what the reframing gives people in return?
Gramsci argues that a society's "common sense" is itself a product of history, not a neutral starting point everyone shares. If every common sense is historically produced, is it possible to think from outside your own, or does critiquing one common sense just build the next one?
Marx argues that the ruling ideas of an age are the ideas of whoever holds power within it, presented as if they belonged to everyone. If you can see that an idea serves a particular interest, does that make the idea any less true, or are truth and interest two separate questions?
Chang shows that today's rich countries used the exact policies, tariffs, subsidies, restrictions on foreign capital, that they now tell developing countries to avoid. Does history give developing countries a fair claim to the same tools, or has enough changed in the global economy that the old rules no longer straightforwardly apply?
This page opened with Wilhelm Wundt drawing a line in 1879 and calling what was on one side of it "psychology." If the boundaries between psychology, sociology, economics, and the other human sciences were redrawn today from nothing, is there any reason to think they would end up looking the way they currently do?

Films
For more see my 10 films for the TOK journey page.

🎬 WATCH — Temple Grandin (2010)

Mick Jackson

A biopic of the autistic scientist Temple Grandin, who became a leading designer of humane livestock handling systems. Made over a decade before Judy Singer's neurodiversity thread became mainstream, but dramatises exactly what BI2 argues: the same trait treated as a deficit by nearly everyone around her becomes, reframed, the source of her most original thinking. My students can watch the full film here.

🎬 WATCH — The Big Short (2015)

Adam McKay

Follows the small number of investors who correctly predicted the 2008 financial crisis while the mainstream financial and economic establishment insisted the housing market couldn't fail. Direct match for BI3's closing paragraph: a paradigm defended by the institutions that depend on it, at the exact moment its own predictions are failing, dramatised rather than argued. Inside Job (2010, Charles Ferguson) is a strong alternative or addition if you want a documentary that names the academic economists involved directly, rather than a dramatisation. My students can watch the full film here.

🎬 WATCH — Margaret Mead (2020)

School of Life

This eight-minute animated video is built entirely around Margaret Mead. It covers the fieldwork behind Coming of Age in Samoa, then extends the argument through her later study in Papua New Guinea, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, where she found the Arapesh raising both men and women to be peaceful and the Mundugumor raising both to be aggressive. Mead's conclusion was that no gender trait is simply human nature. Each is a possibility a given culture teaches, encourages, or shuns. The video makes explicit what BI1 only has space to imply: Mead's method, testing a Western assumption about human nature against a culture that does not share it, is the same move Henrich makes with WEIRD populations, applied to gender rather than adolescence.

The School of Life's back catalogue is worth recommending beyond this one video. Their channel covers several thinkers and ideas that appear across this course, in a format built for exactly this kind of quick, accessible overview.