Commentary: Is a full positivist state in social physics possible?

Commentary: Social Physics will complete the other sciences; but is a full positivist state in social physics even possible?

For Auguste Comte, the end of science is when social physics reaches its full positivist state. This futuristic state seems improbable right now, since it is difficult to capture the invariable relations of successions and likeness, or (in a word) the predictability, of social interactions. If the full positivist state of social physics existed, then criminologists would prevent crime long before it happens, economists would swerve recessions long before it’s noticed and media would be persuasively criticized long before it could influence the naive into irrational behaviors. Yet such a utopia is hard to imagine because there are some insurmountable obstacles in understanding human behavior.

One major obstacle is the power of shame in our everyday lives, whether it’s the shame of abuses done or abuses received. It is difficult to get full empirical data on drug dealing, spouse cheating, hate crimes, sexual harassment, bribery, perjury, murder and other morally or legally shameful acts because the people who do it and their victims are often ashamed of the motivations or consequences of the act. Because of the shame, they will often try to hide, misconstrue or rationalize the act. This by itself means that our data samples from these kinds of people are bias. The less bias data from people who are honest would be nearly impossible to identify, and even if it was possible, that sample group would represent a minority of an entire population (i.e. the minority that’s honest and probably free of stress). The inability to capture real empirical data means that many social physics theories are incomplete, and that many of them have ideas that are pure conjecture.

Another obstacle to social research is that none of us truly understand why we do anything. Everything we do happens for multiple reasons, and it is a mistake to attribute any of our actions to one cause. Yet that is what most people do. This makes identifying causes difficult, even when scientists don’t take the person’s opinion at face value. For example, if a man from Texas believes in the death penalty, for whatever number of reasons he gives, one social scientist might attribute it primarily to the death penalty being a deterrent in crime-ridden Texas whereas another scientist might attribute it mostly to the culture in chest-thumping Texas. Both of these have an effect, but which has more of an effect? Attributing percentages for the causes of phenomena is impossible, which means that we will rarely have an exact and objective understanding of the motivations of human behavior and beliefs.

Comte can argue that once we have a better understanding of physiology, all my concerns will be alleviated.  Perhaps when we understand the mind better, we will come up with better lie detectors or come up with a machine that can identify which motivation are stronger than others. Genetics itself has an effect on human behavior, and as we learn more physiology, we may get an answer on exactly how much genes affect our behavior. But for now, these are huge obstacles in social research.