Falsifying Competing Hypotheses

Sallis vs. the HBD Nordicists.

Consider the competing hypotheses mentioned here – my own theory of intra-European behavioral differences contrasted to that of the HBD Nordicists.  How could one go about testing this, with an eye toward falsification?

One could consider stress responses, particularly that of the amygdala, to different ethnic/racial images.  If Southern and Eastern Europeans simply have stronger responses to alien faces than do Northwest Europeans, and there are no other differences, that would support the HBD Nordicist theory. On the other hand, regardless of possible overall differences in responsiveness, if Northwest Europeans demonstrated relatively greater responses to other Europeans and relatively lesser responses to non-Whites, as compared to Southern and Eastern Europeans who would be expected to exhibit the opposite relative pattern, then that would be more suggestive of my theory.

Note that in the cases of intra-European response measurements, there may need to be input other than just showing the face, such as a statement of the ethnic/racial background of the face (to control for recognition of foreign origin vs. just a difference in phenotype – a Norwegian may object to a German [as in WWII] even if there is phenotypic similarity), and to eliminate the statements as a variable, it should be done in all cases – if shown a Negro face, that could be accompanied by the statement, “this is a Nigerian immigrant.” These are all fine-tuned details.

The extent to which behavioral differences are innate/genetic vs. learned/cultural could be ascertained via twin/adoption/immigrant and descendant studies, and GWAS could be used to attempt to determine gene-phenotype associations.

Unfortunately, such studies, at least each in isolation, may not constitute definitive falsification, but they would provide strong evidence and perhaps in combination could represent reasonably effective falsification tools.

Others may have better ideas on how to approach this – I’m not a “social scientist” (sic) after all – but at least I’m thinking about the falsification problem, which is more than I can say about others with their own theories and hypotheses.