The concept of the captive mind was created by the Malaysian sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas; it was intended to conceptualize the nature of scholarship in the developing world, particularly in relation to western dominance in the social sciences and humanities. The captive mind is defined as an uncritical and imitative mind dominated by an external source, whose thinking is deflected from an independent perspective. The external source is western social science and humanities – source of the uncritical imitation that influences all the constituents of scientific activity such as problem selection, conceptualization, analysis, generalization, description, explanation, and interpretation.