social science

And now, an analogy.

A little over a week ago, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne was in town touting his new book Our Divided Heart: The Battle for the American Ideal in an Age of Discontent. He gave an interesting little promo about how the tension between our desire for individual liberty and freedom has constantly butted up against the quest for community throughout the history of American politics. But what was really memorable for me—what I have found myself thinking about mowing the lawn and driving to pick up my kids over the past few days—was the story he shared when I was introduced to him as a fellow sociologist. (Dionne has his doctorate in sociology from Oxford.)

The gist of the story was how an economist he knew once told him that sociology was “the dentistry of the social sciences.” This economist apparently meant the phrase as something of an insult. Dionne, however, took it as a compliment. Turns out, his father was a dentist, and Dionne is convinced of the nobility of the profession. Almost instantly, one of the other folks at the table quickly chimed in to quip that recent research has revealed the under-appreciated importance of oral health and hygiene to all manner of health and wellness (particularly in terms of heart health).

I don’t remember exactly where the conversation went from there, but I can say that that idea that sociology is to the social body as dentistry is to the physical body is a great image and metaphor. The parallels, moreover, are rich—poor public reputation, second-class professional status, working behind the scenes sweating the small stuff, trying to convince folks to pay attention to things they’d rather ignore, etc. I should also note that I went ahead and scheduled some long-overdue appointments in the big chair for my son and myself. You can never underestimate the power of regular flossing.

We talk a lot about the public value of social scientific research, but sometimes it seems we’re either preaching to the choir or our sermons are falling on deaf ears. Perhaps what we really need is ongoing dialog and debate between the true believers and the skeptics. For a piece that could help push toward that kind of exchange, check out this recent New York Times “Opinionator” piece from Gary Gutting, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame.

As the title suggests, Gutting’s piece poses the question of how reliable social scientific research is when it comes to informing real-world, public policy. Not as much as we might think or wish. Part of the problem is that we often fail to distinguish between early, preliminary tests and more definitive studies. Far more problematic is that fact that the knowledge and information in the social sciences is not as reliable as we might hope. Worse, prediction is where the social sciences really struggle. At the root of our inability to guide and predict from our research, according to Gutting, is the fact that the social world is so complex it doesn’t lend itself to the kind of randomized, controlled experimentation that is the hallmark of so much of the best research in the natural and physical sciences.

These ideas are inspired and informed by a new book called Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society by Jim Manzi. While I haven’t read the book yet (and am a bit skeptical about trying to imitate the natural science model), I’m especially interested to see what my editorial partner Chris Uggen thinks. Chris is, after all, constantly pushing the value of controlled and/or randomized experiments in our field.

Anyway, since that is to come, I’ll give the last word for the moment, to Gutting, in the hope that it will be the first step to further reflection and exchange:

My conclusion is not that our policy discussions should simply ignore social scientific research. We should, as Manzi himself proposes, find ways of injecting more experimental data into government decisions. But above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results. Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do.