GOVT-130 FA3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Margaret Mead, Hot Air Balloon, Fallacy
21 Oct 2016
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Document Summary
Review problems of political science as a social science. 1- it"s hard to do controlled experiments. 2- cultural relativity of general laws (just because things look similar doesn"t mean they are the same and created by the same things) 3- experimental intervention- simply doing experiments changes the outcomes. What is smart in nyc is different from what"s smart in. Papua, new guinea: we have different skill sets and different education based on what"s important in the culture that we grow up in. In the 1890s, someone said they would determine intelligence by measuring brain size. Concluded that white people had bigger skulls and were smarter: the marbles being used for the black skulls were larger than the marbles being used for the white skulls. Study invalidated: our social bias impacts studies. How do we deal with these detrimental problems: anthropology, margaret mead- studied rights of passage among isolated tribes in samoa.
