An Integrated Social Science

One of the topics I think about a lot is the nature and workings of human society and the role of different kinds of people in society. Science seems to have an insufficient understanding of these things at the moment. Sociology studies society at a whole, minimizing the role of the individual or of different kinds of individuals. Psychology studies the individual, but doesn't look at the implications of differing personalities on society as a whole. Personality psychology studies individual differences, but not the results of these differences. Social psychology examines the mechanisms of social relations, but not the differences between individuals. Economics describes production-related behavior on the micro and macro scale, but doesn't consider how production niches are pursued on an individual scale, or the psychological and biological basis for choosing different niches. Political science tries to understand the nature of power structures, but not the role of different kinds of people within them. And so on. (Please correct me if you are competent in any of the fields I have listed and believe I am misrepresenting them.)

Do you sense that the picture is incomplete - that the social sciences lack an overarching philosophical framework? I certainly do. Basically, what is missing today is an integral approach that would put each of these separate fields in their proper perspective and show how individual differences between people play out on the psychological, interpersonal, societal, economic, and political level - in addition to recognizing the commonalities between people that are already described well by these fields.

An integrated social science would show how the societal level reflects upon the individual and how the individual level reflects upon the societal. We would know what kind of people rise to power in different circumstances and different kinds of power systems, as well as the psychological effects on the individual of living under different power systems. We would know what kinds of people are responsible for generating different kinds of social relations and movements and would understand which economic and political conditions bring which tendencies to the forefront.

I'll bet some readers might think I'm going to suggest that socionics can provide this framework. More zealous socionists indeed see socionics as precisely this kind of overarching philosophical framework. However, I am skeptical, because of the underdeveloped empirical basis of socionics. I don't think modern social science will accept a philosophical framework that introduces arbitrary new categories without demonstrating that they are essential to an understanding of phenomena. This would go against Occam's razor. Socionics as a discipline, however, can be very useful to the individual, even if a lack of empiricism often makes dialogue difficult between socionists. At the very least, it has opened my eyes to a lot of very interesting phenomena. If socionics develops an empirical backing, it may be able to provide very valuable insights to contribute to an integral social science.

I personally know of two approaches which are working towards an integral social science. One is Ken Wilber's "integral psychology," which attempts to integrate worldwide esoteric teachings regarding different states of consciousness and developmental stages with modern psychology and sociology. This is very interesting, but so far Wilber seems to have barely touched on such fields as economics and political science. Also, he focuses at the subjective experience of individuals much more than things that can be objectively measured, which may lead to problems with future scientific research in the field. Nonetheless, this approach seems promising.

The other approach is the ever-expanding paradigm of Darwinian evolution and natural selection. Evolution has been successfully applied to physiology and - as of the mid-20th century - to human behavior (via evolutionary psychology). In the late 1970s a new field of inquiry - "memetics" - was born that attempted to apply the concept of replicators to social phenomena (mainly trends, fads, belief systems, ideas), as well as the development of the brain.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett has described the theory of evolution as "universal acid" - a substance that eats through anything, even the container that holds it or the ground that it drops onto. Dennett and others have tried to show how evolution brings us to a new understanding of value systems and morality - areas far removed from what natural selection was originally intended to explain. Incrementally, Darwinism is being applied to more and more of the social sciences.

In my opinion, evolution by natural selection is the concept that is most likely to establish a common framework for understanding the social sciences and the interrelations between them. This process seems to be well underway. In psychology (especially in the West) non-empiric approaches are gradually being marginalized (Freudian psychoanalysis, transpersonal psychology, humanistic psychology, and others), despite their intuitive appeal. As more and more empirical instruments are being developed - primarily through the use of computers and information technologies - it is becoming easier and easier to test hypotheses in the social sciences. And evolution is the theory with the firmest empirical basis in probably all of modern science.

Despite the lack of genuinely empirical studies and fundamental research in socionics, I believe its basic principles actually fit very well into the evolutionary paradigm. I have explained how in a separate article that is all about socionic phenomena but makes no mention of socionics itself. Evolution can help explain why there are differences between people and why there are different varieties of personal relationships.

As socionics and personality psychology develop more clever and effective tools for empirical research, it should become easier to detect defining differences between people. For example, height and weight might be very easier to measure, but they probably play a much less definitive role in interpersonal relationships than other, externally invisible factors. Some people today say of personality typologies that they are unsupported by scientific research and thus are "baloney," but they are wrong. Science has not yet developed the tools to detect definitive personality differences that have been evident to people for thousands of years who have observed these differences in the course of their day-to-day interaction with others. The fact that these differences have been described in different words using different systems does not mean that they do not exist objectively.

Evolution is also helping out the social sciences by highlighting parallels between the animal world and humans' social relations that allow us to look at our species from without and gain a wider perspective. Those who research wild dogs, primates, lions, and other animals which are genetically not far removed from humans find a wide span of personalities, social relationships ranging from altruistic friendship to domination and submission, and social structures that share close similarities to those we find in our own species. Research in genetics and neurobiology, now part of the evolutionary framework, is constantly adding new pieces to the puzzle.

Natural selection - which raises our understanding of competition to a whole new level - can help us understand what's really going on behind the scenes of economic interaction and production. The concepts of comparative advantage and production niches - which are fundamentally Darwinian - apply just as much to human relationships as they do to national economies, as some economists have suggested (I wish I could cite something here).

A consideration of evolutionary factors affecting personal relationships would also help flesh out socionics, which currently suffers from its appearance of maximalism. Socionics seems to simplify some aspects of personality and relationships and has a hard time accounting for characteristics that depart from what is described by its model. Many socionists would disagree with me, saying that by introducing such concepts as "accented functions," one can add flexibility to the socionics model. However, socionics cannot explain why some people's functions would be "accented" in the first place (except by assuming some previous intertype influence on the person that led to a continual emphasis of that function). Economics, psychology, and social psychology - underpinned by evolution - on the other hand, can provide simpler explanations for departures from socionic patterns.

Obviously, a lot of research remains to be done, and it is unlikely that socionics would become part of any integral social science without undergoing some sort of metamorphosis in order to become more like a natural science. The same can probably be said of other social sciences. But this is what might well happen in the future as our technology and scientific understanding advances.