Start with an observation. For example, think back to college. You're in class, and the guy next to you -- who is obviously a football player -- says an unbelievably dumb thing in class. So you ask yourself: why? And the answer comes back:
This is a theory. It is not a very good one, but it is a start. What would make it better?
One thing would be to make it a little more general. Theories that are too narrow and specific are not very interesting, even if they are correct. So, we could say:
This is better, but the theory still has no sense of process, of explanation. It says, athletes have this property of being dumb, and that's why they ask dumb questions. Dumb begets dumb. Does that actually explain anything? Or does it just push the thing to be explained one step back? Why are athletes dumb? It's like when kids ask you 'Why is the sky blue?' and you say 'Because it is, that's why'.
There is also a circularity here. What do we mean when we say that a person is dumb? It means that they consistently behave dumbly. The only way we know people are dumb is by what they say and do. Yet what we are trying to explain is a dumb thing that they said. So we are in effect saying they say dumb things because they say dumb things.
The really big problem with circularity is that it prevents theories from being falsifiable. For example, take the theory that if you perform the Rain Dance Ceremony and all the participants are pure of heart, it will rain the next day. This theory is not falsifiable because if you perform the ceremony and it rains, the theory is confirmed. If you perform the ceremony and it doesn't rain, that tells you right away that one of the participants was not pure of heart, and again the theory is confirmed.
A good theory has a sense of process. It describes a mechanism by which A makes B happen, like the way the gears in a car transfer the rotation in the engine to a rotation of the tires. For example, look at this explanation:
This has much more of a sense of explanation. When reading this account, we have a much greater sense of satisfaction that something is being accomplished by theorizing. Of greatest importance is that the focus of the story is a mechanism, not an enduring property of a class of people (athletes). This means that we can apply the same reasoning to other areas. Let's rewrite it this way:
An implication of this theory is that we should also observe that good musicians should be dumb in class. If we don't find this, the theory is wrong. This is in part what makes it such a good theory. It is general enough to generate implications for other groups of people and other contexts, all of which serve as potential tests of the theory. That is, the theory is fertile.
The essence of theorizing is that you start with an observation, and then imagine the observation as the outcome of a (hidden) process.
Here is another process that would lead to the outcome of a football player asking a dumb question in class:
This theory also has implications for other groups of people. Here one last theory:
An interesting implication of this theory is that we should tend to think that good looking people are dumb too, especially when looks are of particular importance. This would imply that for women in particular, good looking women would be seen as airheads, bimbos.
We can use the fertility and non-circularity of all these theories to help test and choose among them. If the theory is specified clearly enough, we can present a situation to a theory and ask what it would expect as an outcome. The idea, then, is to collect a set of situations which the different theories would have different predictions or expectations about.
Consider, for example, how football players should appear in class out of season. Will they still be asking dumb questions? According to the first theory (Limited Time), football players should not ask dumb questions out of season, because there is plenty of time to study. According the the second theory (Recognition), members of the football team should continue to ask dumb questions because they are still football players and still getting recognition. The third theory (Jealousy) also yields the expectation of continued dumb questions, because we are still jealous.
What about how football players appear in schools where football is not important? Will they still be asking dumb questions? This one reverses the pattern of expections. The Limited Time theory clearly says "yes" because they still have to practice even if nobody on campus cares about football. The other two theories, however, are based on social comparison factors that go away when football ceases to be a source of status.
Finally, consider athletes who do not look like athletes -- they are not unusually big (football) or tall (basketball) or fat (sumo wrestling). Will they appear to ask dumb questions? The Limited Time theory will again clearly say "yes" because practice time is unaffected by looks. The Recognition theory is not quite specified carefully enough to be sure, but I think it would say "yes", because even if people can't recognize them on the street, if they are members of a successful team in a reasonably popular sport (say, tennis), they will still feel the pride and recognition from the cognoscenti, so they will not feel the need to excel in class. The Jealousy theory would say "no" for most people because they just don't know that they are in the presence of an athlete.
The other two theories, however, are based on social comparison factors that go away when football ceases to be a source of status.
| Question | Limited Time | Recognition | Jealousy |
| Football players ask dumb questions out of season? | N | Y | Y |
| FB players ask dumb questions in schools where FB is not important? | Y | N | N |
| Will athletes who do not look like athletes ask dumb questions? | Y | Probably | Probably not |
I have suggested so far that a good theory has
I would like to add two criteria: parsimony and surprise.
Parsimony refers to the simplicity of a theory -- the avoidance of positing complex relationships when a simpler alternative exists. The main reason for preferring parsimony is that nature seems to. Complicated things have more ways of breaking down, and less likelihood, therefore, to endure to the present. The other reason is that models are useless unless they are simple enough for people to understand. Models are meant to pull out the important parts, and leave the unimportant behind. The power of a model can be defined as the proportion reduction in complexity that it affords over nature.
An example of parsimony is chance models. Suppose we want to understand why almost all human societies have significant inequality. We could posit a number of special reasons, including supernatural causes like "God wants it that way", but it is important to realize that inequality is what we would expect even if there were no special reasons why it should happen. If we take 100 coconuts and divide them randomly among 10 people, there are only a handful of ways it could come out that shows no inequality: but there are 10 to the 30th power ways to divide them so that there is inequality (about as many ways as there have been seconds since the beginning of the universe).
| Copyright ©1996 Stephen P. Borgatti | Go to Home Page | Revised: September 22, 1996 |