Journal 2

Journal 2

Gary Hensley

06/01/2026

In the world of the social sciences, it is regarded as scientific as any other science. We can apply scientific principles to the study of cybersecurity. The principles we can look at are relativism, objectivity, parsimony, empiricism, skepticism, ethical neutrality, and determinism.

Starting with relativism. It is the idea that everything is linked in a form. This can be seen with technology and its fast growth. The birth of the internet led to access to massive amounts of information. The ability to share findings across the world in seconds. Medical systems rely on technology, and our pay system has led to more technology based banking, with people carrying less physical cash. Relativism can be related to cybersecurity, as our technological systems grow and our society depends on them. The security of the systems needs to be built on the past exploited weak spots. The world has now relied on technology in our everyday lives. When we study cybersecurity in the massive landscape it has grown using the social sciences principle of objectivity keeps the focus on the problem. Objectivity is to keep personal opinions and beliefs out of the study. When faced with questions in cybersecurity, you see all the different points of view.  Should you limit free speech online or should laws make it so that if hate speech or political speech is detected, a person automatically loses internet access? Many questions come up like this in cybersecurity and we need to look at these topics with a objectivity view. Scientists use a lot of methods when studying topics. A principle that is used to help explain an explanation is parsimony, which is the idea that we keep the explanation as simple as possible. For cybersecurity, this may look like saying the need for money when asking why someone steals credit card info. As complex as our topics and studies get, a key principle taken in social science is empiricism. This is where you base only on what you know and can see. This is used to not muddy up a conclusion with assumptions. In cybersecurity, we can use this to keep the study to patterns or known facts.  The opportunity we get with studying cybercrimes allows us to study ethical issues. When studying ethical issues, we should keep an ethical neutrality. This is where we adhere to ethical standards and not place someone in a study in harm, or lie about the study, and protect the people in the study. One of the last principles I would like to touch base on is determinism. This is the principle that actions are affected by preceding events. In the study of behavior, we can see a pattern from past events and use that to help come to a conclusion. In cybersecurity we use this to look at patterns and see people don’t pick good passwords, so we add password minimums. This still allows for improvement, they write the password down, and someone steals it. So, we add multi factor authentication to passwords. Knowing people use easy passwords leads to requirements, then hacked passwords or written down passwords leads to multiple authentications.

The study into cybersecurity and behaviors the use of social science principles allows us to conduct research just like any other. These principles allow us to keep points of view and opinions from messing up the study. With technology surrounding every aspect of our lives it is important to look at the impact it has on people and the laws created for the changing cyber world.