Subjectivity and Objectivity in the Social Sciences

This paper summarizes several ways in which social scientists have conceived of subjectivity and objectivity, and the problems that have appeared in each case. We being with experimental gaming. Morton Deutsch and R. M. Krauss ran a series of experiments with a trucking game some ten to fifteen years ago. A pair of experimental subjects was shown a game board of roughly the following design: Fig. i. The trucking game. The game problem was to move one’s truck from start to goal in minimum time. Players were paid a fixed amount for each trip and were charged truck-ing costs, by the second, for the time their truck was on the road. The most direct route, using the one-way road, yielded a profit of about 250 per trip. If a player waited at E or F until the other player had finished using the one-lane road and then used the road himself he could win about 50. If he used the winding alternate route he would lose at least 10~; and if the two players met in the one-lane road and eventually had to back up and perhaps even take the alternate route they could lose quite large amounts of money. It is apparent that this game is an empirical interpretation of Leader, though Deutsch himself formalizes it less accurately as ’the bargaining problem ’ (Deutsch, 1965, p. 519). The solution to iterated Leader, or to the bargaining problem, is to alternate DC and CD. Empirically this consists of taking turns waiting at points E or F (Fig. i) until one’s partner has finished using the one-lane road, and then