be desirable for one thing, if the public were to understand that the designation "science" in that context is somewhat different than the designation in the context as applied to the usually called physical sciences.

Mr. HAYS. In other words, it was never intended to connotate an exact science.

Dr. HOBBS. Unfortunately, in many of the writings that connotation is not only present but it is emphasized. For example, you will see books on social science-textbooks on sociology-coming out with drawings of calipers on the advertising blurbs, test tubes on the cover, to give the teachers the impression that this is science in the sense that the term is used in physical science. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of that, and it confuses not only the general public but many of the people in the field who are not too familiar with scientific methods themselves.

The CHAIRMAN. You have read the statement which Mr. Dodd made to the committee?

Dr. HOBBS. I have not, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. You are not familiar with it, then?

Dr. HOBBS. I am not, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. He raised the question of some trouble arising from the premature acceptance of the social sciences. You are not ready to comment on that. If you are, I would be interested in having you comment.

Dr. HOBBS. I would, sir. I do intend to comment after I have given this background which I think is essential.

The CHAIRMAN. Very well; you may proceed.

Dr. HOBBS. As for reducing human behavior, particularly the aspects of human behavior which are most significant in the relationships between people and in civilized society, to attempt to reduce those to quantitative units is extremely difficult, and for the most part at the present time impossible.

With human beings there are some things which are quantitative; that is, your bodily temperature could be called a quantitative thing, which in turn can be measured with an instrument, the thermometer. Similarly with your blood pressure, your corpuscle count, the proportion between white and red, the number of hairs on your head, and things like that, can be counted. Sometimes it is pretty easy to count the number of hairs on your head. The other things, though, like the sentiments-patriotism, love, bravery, cowardice, honesty, things of that sort-have never been reduced to quantitative units. There is still a large element of the qualitative in them. That is, if you say you are patriotic, your patriotism cannot be measured in precise units which will be agreed upon by all the observers.

Mr. HAYS. Professor, I think we are agreed on that. Is there any argument on that score?

Dr. HOBBS. The impression is given in many works, and I will cite some of them, that that is not the case. It is a crucial and fundamental point which I want to give by way of background.

Mr. HAYS. You mean you say that you can measure patriotism? Dr. HOBBS. That is implied.

Mr. HAYS. I was aware that there are people who think you can measure patriotism, but it is always according to their standards.

Dr. HOBBS. Unfortunately, that is the same way with some who call themselves social scientists.

Mr. HAYS. That has been true always.

Dr. HOBBS. Yes, sir.

Mr. HAYS. As long as there have been human beings.

Dr. HOBBS. Yes.

Mr. HAYS. Maybe they did not call it patriotism, but whatever it is. Dr. HOBBS. Loyalty or whatever you call it. Then the other item, the matter of the stability of the units which are being studied, also, I think, is quite crucial. If you are studying electrons, if you are studying matter, or the behavior of matter, the method of study you employ, the amount of the time you spend on studying it, the attitude which you have while you are making the study, does not affect the object which is under study; that is, if you think electrons are nasty or unpleasant or things like that, that is not going to affect the behavior of electrons. But unfortunately, with human beings again, sometimes the very fact that a study is being made can change their behavior. That is always a possibility which you have to be very consciously aware of. An illustration of that of course would be the Kinsey report. The mere fact that you ask people questions in the rapid fire nonemotional manner which Professor Kinsey says he uses, would put a different aura on sexual behavior than might otherwise be present. It could change your attitude toward sex.

Similarly, if you are studying juvenile delinquents, and if your attitude in the study is that delinquency is caused by their environment, or caused by the fact that the mother was too harsh with the children in their youth, or overwhelmed them with affection, then there is always the possibility-and some investigators contend that this is a fact-the delinquents themselves become convinced that this is the case. They begin to blame their parents, their early environment, and the situation which you have attempted to study has been changed in the very process of making the study.

Mr. HAYS. As I get it, then, you are saying in effect that there are dangers in studying hazards.

Dr. HOBBS. That is right.

Mr. HAYS. But you would not advise that we give up studying juvenile delinquency?

Dr. HOBBS. Absolutely not. These things certainly need study.

The CHAIRMAN. Professor, since you referred to the Kinsey report, what do you consider the significance of the fact that the initial Kinsey study was financed by a foundation grant?

Dr. HOBBS. Sir, I intend to use the Kinsey report as an illustration of some of these pseudoscientific techniques, and as an illustration of the possible influence which this type of study may have. In that context, I would prefer to take it up that way.

The CHAIRMAN. Yes.

Mr. HAYS. You are saying that Dr. Kinsey is a pseudoscientist, is that right?

Dr. HOBBS. No, sir.

Mr. HAYS. He has used the pseudoscientific approach.

Dr. HOBBS. I said that he has used techniques which are pseudoscientific.

Mr. HAYS. I would not know anything about that. I am not acquainted with his books or techniques.

Dr. HOBBS. I am, sir, and I will explain something about them a little bit later.

So with the study of human behavior you have the difficulty that in many instances it is virtually impossible to reduce the type of behavior to a quantitative unit. There is always the hazard that the mere fact that you are studying the thing and the way in which you study that may change the very thing you are studying.

I will cite specific illustrations of that a little bit later.

The findings of the study can affect the type of behavior which is being studied. Again if you come out and say in your findings that sexual behavior of a wide variety is prevalent and so on, that in itself can-do not misunderstand me, I am not saying that studies should not be published because of this factor, but it should be recognized that the findings of a study can affect the type of behavior which is being studied.

Mr. HAYS. To get the emphasis off sex and on something else that I am more interested in, say, juvenile delinquency, you would probably agree with me that the very fact that the newspapers constantly say or have been recently that juvenile delinquency is increasing, and it is becoming an ever-greater problem, might have a tendency to make some juveniles think about delinquency. But on the other hand, we cannot hide our heads in the sand and say it does not exist, can we?

Dr. HOBBS. I certainly believe that the facts in this case, those findings are from the uniform crime reports of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and they are factual findings, and they certainly should be publicized. But they are not publicized in the newspaper as being scientific findings. That is the extent of delinquency is not being published as being a scientific finding. If it were, then it could have a different effect.

Mr. HAYS. I am inclined to agree with you that it could have an effect, and perhaps various effects. I think you would perhaps agree with my thinking that when you are dealing with juveniles or the subjects in Dr. Kinsey's books you are dealing with human beings, and there are just as many variations as the people you are dealing with; is that not right?

Dr. HOBBS. There are tremendous variables which have to be taken into consideration, which make the problem of a study of human beings an extremely difficult one.

Mr. HAYS. In other words, if you approach a study of a thousand juveniles, you might get conceivably 1,000 different reactions to the same situation. The chances are that you would not, but it is possible that you could.

Dr. HOBBS. It is quite possible.

Mr. HAYS. Just the same as every one of the thousand have different fingerprints.

Dr. HOBBS. Yes, sir. With this scientific method being developed, another thing you have to have is that even if you are able to reduce the things you are studying to quantitative, uniform, and stable units, then merely doing that does not constitute the scientific method. Merely counting things is not science. The philosopher of science, Alfred North Whitehead, said in effect, if we had merely counted things, we would have left science exactly in the state in which it was 1,000 years ago.

Unfortunately, also, in social science, you do get this tendency which is particularly pronounced now to rely, I would say, and many of the outstanding people in the field will agree with me, an overemphasis on the tendency merely to count. Again, do not misunderstand me. I do not say that none of that should be done. It is a matter of degree.

Mr. GOODWIN. I do not understand, Doctor, what you mean by saying that the result of a count is not something exact. If you take a complete count of it you have the full picture, have you not?

Dr. HOBBS. Yes, sir, but to go back to Congressman Hays' question about juvenile delinquency,. if you were merely going to count these deliquents and measure the lengths of their noses and the size and shape of their ears, and so on, you could make such measurements which might be exact to a high degree. You could make such measurements for a long, long time. I think you will agree you probably would not find out anything basic about delinquency.

Mr. HAYS. You mean the size of their noses has nothing to do with it. Dr. HOBBS. I would not venture to hazard a guess. I don't know. I would say probably not.

Mr. HAYS. I would be brave and guess that it would not.

The CHAIRMAN. But as I understand, you mean to say that it would not get at what might be the basic causes of juvenile delinquency. Dr. HOBBS. I would be extremely doubtful, of course. Mr. HAYS. We would all agree on that, would we not?

Dr. HOBBS. In other words, mere accounting is not enough. Even if you can count with relative accuracy, you still have to have a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a statement as nearly as exact as you can make it, a statement of what you are going to try to prove, or what you are going to try to disprove, and then you make your controlled observations. Then you will find that the hypothesis is not valid or you find that it has been validated by your observations, by your inductions and by your deductions.

The final test of scientific method is verification. This, of course, is particularly vital when you are dealing with human behavior and where the findings of the study could influence human behavior. In these cases, the findings should be verified not only by the person who made the study himself, but they should be verified by other people who are skeptical of it before you make any attempt to change human behavior or the society on the basis of the supposed scientific studies. One test of verification is prediction. Even here you have to be extremely careful because sometimes what seems to be a prediction is merely a lucky guess. That is, if I predict the Yankees are going to win the pennant this year, they might win the pennant-I am a little bit afraid they will-but the fact that my prediction came true does not prove that I had worked it out scientifically. A prediction could be a lucky guess, it could be a coincidence, or it could be the result of factors other than the factors which you are investigating under your hypothesis.

Another common mistake is to confuse projection with prediction. I could predict that women will wash on Monday and iron on Tuesday. When I am doing that, I am not making a prediction, but I am assuming merely that the pattern of behavior which held true in the past will continue to hold true in the future. Many of the so-called

predictions of population growth are merely projections in this sense, rather than scientific predictions.

Of course, as you know, most of those projections themselves have been erroneous because the pattern of behavior does change.

Mr. HAYS. That is one of the reasons, though, is it not, Professor, that women have always been interesting. It has always been unsafe to predict about them.

Dr. HOBBS. That, Congressman, is a situation which neither you nor I would like to change. Let us not make that too scientific.

Mr. HAYS. I agree with you.

Dr. HOBBS. With the scientific method having been so successful, and then employed

Mr. WORMSER. Dr. Hobbs, may I interrupt to ask you, is not experiment an essential mechanism in ordinary natural science whereas it is unavailable in social sciences?

Dr. HOBBS. As a generalization that would be correct, yes. It is very much more difficult to set up conditions to conduct a controlled experiment in social science than it is in physical science, and the ability to set up those controlled experiments in physical science has been a keystone in the tremendous success of the physical sciences.

Mr. KOCH. Do you say that in connection with juvenile delinquency some social scientists have actually measured noses or something similar?

Dr. HOBBS. No. I just used that as an extreme illustration.

With the tremendous success of physical science, particularly as the findings of physical science were translated by technologists into practical things, like steam engines, and automobiles, and so on, it is quite understandable that many people who have been studying and have been interested in human behavior, should apply the same method-and this is crucial-or should apply what they think is the same method, or what they can lead other people to believe is the same method. Throughout the history of social science you can see this correspondence between the attempts to apply the type of scientific method which is at that time successful in science to the study of human behavior.

Mrs. ProST. Dr. Hobbs, you related a while ago about these habits of individuals, such as women washing on Monday and ironing on Tuesday. In what manner, now, do you feel that relates to the foundations, this study that we are making here?

Dr. HOBBS. I want to give this background to show the differenceand it is an essential difference between science as it is used in the physical sciences, and science as it is used in the social sciences, which is the type of thing that is sponsored by the foundations.

Do

Mr. HAYS. Doctor, I have always been aware of that difference. you think that there is a general unawareness of it?

Dr. HOBBS. I believe that is quite common. I am sorry if I am taking too long.

Mr. HAYS. No, take all the time you want.

Dr. HOBBS. I do want to give this background. Then I will give specific illustrations of the point you have in mind, where there is a definite effort to convince people that the two things are the same. I will bring that out.

Mr. HAYS. There has always been a loose term-at least I have always been familiar with it-in which we differentiated between the