Science Bias: How an Obsession with Analytics is Promoting Bias within Our Testing Protocols

Ok, so please forgive me in advance. We all know I love science. I love it to bits. I love testing hypotheses and thinking about causation and doing FIELD WORK, yes, yes all this. However, recently it has come to my attention (most painfully), that our current experimental design and experimental protocols-particularly in the fields of psychology (which isn’t a real science, ignore what everyone else tells you) and biology-is set up on some pretty flawed foundations.

Testing is integral to developing relationships, we all know this. However, the quantification methods and basis of design currently accepted as ‘correct’ seems to have some big holes. As I study for yet another needlessly complex, long, and difficult standardized test to prove that I am smart enough, good enough, and gosh darn it, pretty enough to be a doctor, I’ve had a chance to meditate on some of these ‘basics’ of experimental reasoning that we seem to take for granted. Let’s start with psychology because it is my least favorite science-like subject. (It’s not a science).

In the basics of psychology section, for example, we are still expected to have all of Freud’s developmental stages memorized and be able to use them in the identification of common behavioral experiences at various ages. Now, to remind those of you who may have had the privilege of forgetting/never knowing about Freud, this is the man that thinks all people progress through a oral, anal, genital, and phallic stage and focuses most of his research on supposed ‘penis-envy’ and the bizarre sexual obsession that children must have with their opposite gendered parent.

But, Ossie, you say, surely we are not basing our modern understanding of mental health, thinking patterns, and socio-cultural foundations on this man? Alas, poor reader, we still are. We’ve made diagnostic tools to help us classify which stage of penis envy your young daughters are experiencing and how much of the psyche may be repressed by their Super Ego. As if that was a real thing. Ludicrous. But, yet, here are our surveys and our scales and our longitudinal studies based off these ideas as if they were real. And important. And then we have experts make up ridiculous advice for married partners about ‘masculine and feminine’ traits and how to best address the ‘masculine’ portion of the Id, soothing it with phallic reassurance and appeasing the ‘feminine energy suffering from penis envy’ in your partner with ‘emotional support.’ Does anyone actually know what emotional support is? We all talk about it a lot, but I have a sneaking suspicion it may be more like crystal deodorant.

But this clap-trap survives because researchers have this delightful illusion of respectability with their qualitative and quantitative measures of correlational success. They can put numbers to this ‘energy’ and they can ask participants to ‘rate’ their feelings. And suddenly, we introduce this type of sociological training into the rest of the world with no real internal validity or external relevance as if you have to interact with people in such a way. That this is a path towards “working” on your relationship. All smoke and mirrors and lies.

Our modern perceptions of research and the resulting application of the data is obsessed with quantification methods. It seems to offer us a logical, ‘masculine’ path forward that our culture seems so desperate for (particularly in relationships). As if the numbers will tell us what to do in a twisted type of new religion that offers nothing but self-improvement and horoscope lies. Well. I am here to offer that there are some things that cannot be quantified and are thus outside the reach of science. I get it. That’s blasphemy. We should be able to put numbers to anything. And science must have its numbers. We must have our scales and graphs and results and all the delicious bits that help us determine the relationships between things.

But, but I have to point out, love cannot be isolated. Personality cannot be isolated. You cannot make a null hypothesis for the nature of man. You cannot. No matter how one tries to split the human experience into isolated boxes to be tested and rated, they are not isolate-able. They are holistic, integrated and inseparable. We cannot even truly understand what emotions are or what consciousness means, much less write a prescription for a relationship. We cannot take a test to see how good a doctor we’ll be or what kind of social impact we’ll have in law. The SAT, ACT, MCAT, LSAT are all tests designed to make sure we’ll succeed. At what? School? School has a lot of pieces, only some are based on reading, writing, and mathematics. And those pieces that are tested in reading, writing, and mathematics are so limited, so truncated to support a specific kind of student—a blank slate of obedience and social norms, that the whole system seems to be self-selecting for the empty, the dull, the regurgitated slop of the least common denominator that our assembly-line, piss-poor approach to actual education can reflect. Is this what we want our professionals to be? Carbon-copies of skeleton education system?

Is this what we want our relationships to be? Therapeutic, meaningless words painted over true emotions?

Human personalities are messy. There is no ‘right’ personality fit or predictor or magic phrase that can suddenly spring open the gates of communication or guarantee that a doctor with be kind, brilliant, sensitive, and fantastically profitable. In fact, all this obsession with quantifying people and their human needs is only really good for keeping the power hierarchies in place and down-grading self-efficacy. By submitting to testing and therapy and all the perceptions based on these antiquated, racist, sexist, elitist policies, we are giving up our freedom and individual agency. And all of it in the name of ‘science’ and all that is testable.

There is more to life than test-ability. And all the good, messy, interesting bits are in those complicated places that can’t be broken down, no matter how many ridiculous theories and papers with contorted numerical findings flood our perceptions of what it means to be ourselves and with others. GIVE ME THE WEIRD, I WILL NOT RUN FROM IT!