Our values influence the questions we ask.
“Studies show that women in traditional religious communities with dense communal structures report high satisfaction — often higher than women in the “liberated” middle. A standard social scientist, formed by the assumption that individual autonomy is the baseline human condition, reaches for debunking explanations: false consciousness, adaptive preferences, she doesn’t know any better. The data is the same. The conclusion differs because the question differs. The autonomy-formed researcher asks: why does she report satisfaction despite her constraints? Someone formed by MacIntyre, by Eckhart, by the experience of community, asks a different question: what if the formation is the satisfaction? What if the communal structure that looks like constraint from outside is, from inside, the material through which the self was built?”