In the above-titled article from 1971, political scientist Brian Vargus wrote:
Resistance to community research is growing, in part, because applied sociologists have not delivered the answers sought by their clients. Current analyses of this phenomenon are too simple because they overlook the setting in which the client-practitioner transaction takes place. The situation is complicated by “role strains” felt on both sides. An overlooked component of this is the exploitation of subjects and applied research by the reformulation of projects in “scientific and respectable” terms. One possible structural change at least to lessen this pattern and hence bolster the contract between applied sociology and its clients is suggested.
It’s interesting to read this sort of reflection from half a century ago, at which time social science played a much different role in society than it does now. There are some bits that would ring true today–a concern that social science is a sort of colonial enterprise, in which the lives of the “colonists” are being exploited for the benefit of the careers of the “colonizers”–but overall it just feels like a much different era, a time when there was the hope and even the expectation that social science would address and help to solve major social problems such as poverty, crime, depression, war, and so forth. This didn’t seem impossible, at least from the perspective of the early 1960s, when it could’ve been reasonable to think that economics had solved the problems of unemployment and was on its way to solve the problem of poverty; to think that game theory had, if not solved, at least decreased the risks of international conflict; to think that some combination of psychotherapy and pharmaceuticals were on their way to eradicating mental illness as well as helping the non-mentally-ill to be happy with their lots in life; etc. By 1971 the wheels were beginning to fall off the bus, but we hadn’t reached the current state of affairs, under which social ills are considered to be either impossible to solve or else addressable only by implausible methods (whether that be retraining people by teaching them all to “learn to code” or reorganizing the economy via those 100% tariffs we keep hearing about).
So, yeah, there was something refreshing about reading Vargus’s take, in which social scientists were being criticized for “rent seeking” (as we would call it today) rather than doing their true job of saving the world. Nowadays the usual criticisms of social science are that it provides justification for perpetuating inequality (the job of much of economics), tools for actively increasing the level of inequality (that’s finance, including all those useful how-to-invest-your-money tips, which increase inequality in that they’re only useful to people who have the spare cash to invest), ideological arguments for the status quo (that’s the job of “freakonomics”), promotes a left-wing political agenda (that would be all of sociology, most of anthropology, and lots of the social science that’s published in medical journals such as Lancet), promotes left-wing racial and gender ideology (lots of academic psychology, sociology, etc.), promotes right-wing racial and gender ideology (a loud minority of academic psychology, sociology, etc.), or just that it’s a waste of time and resources.
There are lots complaints about social science nowadays, but not many complaints that it’s exploiting its research participants or that it’s not doing its job of improving society (in Vargus’s words, “a relationship in which both the university and the community it serves are cooperating in achieving some shared goals”). Interesting. Given all the unfulfilled promises of economic planning, game theory, monetarism, psychoanalysis, criminology, anthropology, opinion polling, and so many other branches of social science, perhaps we should see our current era of reduced expectations as a step forward, but it still makes me sad.
As regular readers know, I still the social sciences are worth studying even though they’re mostly useless. As I wrote a few years ago:
What’s the point of social science? Why do we do it at all?
We study the natural sciences because they help us understand the natural world and they also solve problems, from vaccines to the building of bridges to more efficient food production. We study the social sciences because they help us understand the social world and because, whatever we do, people will engage in social-science reasoning.
The baseball analyst Bill James once said that the alternative to good statistics is not no statistics, it’s bad statistics. Similarly, the alternative to good social science is not no social science, it’s bad social science.
The reason we do social science is because bad social science is being promulgated 24/7, all year long, all over the world. And bad social science can do damage.
In summary: the utilitarian motivation for the natural sciences is that can make us healthier, happier, and more comfortable. The utilitarian motivation for the social sciences is they can protect us from bad social-science reasoning. It’s a lesser thing, but that’s what we’ve got, and it’s not nothing.
Again, though, I have a nostalgia for the days when social science was legitimately believed to be directly useful in curing social ills.
Andrew –
As regular readers know, I still [think?] the social sciences are worth studying even though they’re mostly useless .
When you say the social sciences are “mostly useless,” how do you quantify utility? The absolute value of social sciences doesn’t depend on the relative flaws of individual components, like the survey distrust or methodological issues you highlight. Even if a high proportion of studies are “useless,” the field’s broader contributions—insights into society, policy impacts, or theoretical advances—could retain significant value. How would the aggregate value even be measured? That seems like a very complex task to me.
I also caught that typo which Joshua points to. Instead of “think,” I suppose some other verb phrase might be in order: “fervently believe” or “reluctantly conclude”. As to “useless,” I recall something of decades ago when an English mother sadly noted that her son is studying sociology; she claimed that being a mother was all you needed to be an expert in how people behave (badly).
This attitude of denigration is exemplified in “Dance to the Music of Time” series of novels by Anthony Powell and the ridicule heaped on the Kenneth Widmerpool character.
Joshua:
I think the social sciences are mostly useless in a direct sense, as compared to the natural sciences which have led to lots of directly useful things such as trains, bridges, vaccines, telephones, bombs, etc. I think the main value of social science is to combat simplistic social-science thinking, and that’s important–I just wouldn’t call it “useful” in the way that I’d describe so many of the products of natural sciences. And when social scientists try to promote their ideas as being useful, the results can often be embarrassing, as with nudge, power pose, etc.
Not everything can be quantified. This is a problem with a lot of social “science.”
How do we measure, or lack thereof, of no longer having the widespread belief that children are miniature adults who are meant to be seen and not heard?
And how would we measure the contributions of social science in that widespread development?
Seems like social science has informed many applied areas ranging from advertising, economics, medical practice, to education. In each domain, it seems like we might be able to measure some sort of value?
One problem, it seems to me, is that utility or value is inherently subjective. I certainly believe kids are better off because social scientists have convinced our society that kids shouldn’t be treated like miniature adults who should be seen but not heard. And I believe that as a society, we’re better off for that. Developmental psychology, I’d say, is at least one social science that’s had a meaningfully positive impact. But I suppose some might say we were better off when kids were treated as miniature adults who should be seen and not heard?
But then, I think we could apply the same questions to subjective evaluations of the utility of the hard sciences. Are we actually better off because of computers or space travel?
I get annoyed with what seems like knee-jerk denigration of social sciences as less “useful” than hard sciences. Hard sciences have more rigorous methods, but the rhetoric about their utility feels overblown sometimes. Social sciences have real wins, like in education or mental health. I think we shouldn’t just accept conclusions about the higher utility of hard sciences. Dismissing social sciences feels like a bandwagon to me these days, and I think there are some harmful outcomes from it.
Here is a Tom Lehrer critique of sociology:
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/sociology.pdf
There is a video of this but it seems to be blocked now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX5II-BJ8hI
I do wonder about these relative value issues. I’m tempted to say that most of the value of the sciences is realized through application (e.g. engineering). A recent talk by Erik Brynjolfsson at an open.ai forum had him emphasizing a point he has made repeatedly about the unmeasured value of IT. For example, he cites the extraordinary large and unmeasured benefits of the internet – citing how much people use it and how it doesn’t directly enter GDP because access is free (ignoring the many paid ways we use to access it, which does enter GDP). But I think a more important omission is the tremendous waste of time that many people spend on the internet. As well as the many costs associated with the rampant spread of misinformation.
I don’t mean to debate whether the internet is a net positive or negative for human welfare – nor to debate whether science or social science is a net benefit or the relative sizes of the net benefits. What I want to point to is the incompleteness of most of the discussions. We tend to focus on the positive examples of benefits, downplaying the costs, and often cherry-picking examples. Most technologies are though to be net benefits – we can’t imagine our lives without them. But that is far from a complete picture of their myriad costs and benefits. Automobiles are valuable and I happen to love driving, and couldn’t live where I do without being able to drive. But thousands of people are killed by them and the automobile infrastructure has vastly modified our environment. I think the belief that the benefits clearly outweigh the costs is just that – a belief. I don’t think we have a careful accounting with which to support that belief. And I don’t think we have a careful accounting to say whether the natural or social sciences have more “usefulness.”
Dale:
Yes, by “useful” I mean that it has some practical use. Not that it’s necessarily a social benefit. That’s why I included the example of bombs.
Just focusing on “practical use” leaves me confused in similar, but not identical, ways. Any tangible physical product will have some practical use, except perhaps for pet rocks (even those can give recipients pleasure). Are insights such as “incentives matter” or personality types of practical use? I know people use such insights, for better or worse, just like tangible products like bombs. And there are plenty of natural sciences work (most of abstract physics for me) that I’d find it hard to say is of practical use, at least until it is embodied in some physical product. I guess I find the whole idea of trying to compare the usefulness of the natural vs social sciences a bit like comparing the GRE scores of graduate students in different subjects: not very useful.
If you are counting engineering and medicine as sciences, I think you should be including a lot more as social sciences. If you want practical use, why not consider all the things that social scientists do, not just economists? You don’t think fairer redistricting is important? We know you don’t believe the evidence on head start or early childhood health interventions, but you don’t think they are important and impactful? You don’t think that the nightmare we are in right now is a consequence of the changes in society that for most of us (although not some of your regulars) has meant that we have had to critically think about the role social structures and attitudes in creating disparities? That for serious people eugenics and the idea of a biological race has faded? I just watched the film “Lilly” last night (about Lilly Ledbetter), and if you don’t think that the experience of American women in the workforce has changed in part thanks to social science research that investigated pay disparities, I just don’t know what to say.
Elin:
Social science can indeed be used to evaluate redistricting plans–I did some research on this, back in the day!–but you can get fair redistrictings, or at least get 90%+ there, without any social science, just by getting a group of non-interested parties together with a map. Social science has been used to improve teaching methods, and that’s great; I just think it’s a small contribution compared to the trains, bridges, vaccines, etc., that have been designed using the principles of natural sciences. Regarding eugenics, etc.: yes, that’s one of the things I was getting at when I said that the biggest value of social science is to counteract bad social science reasoning. Regarding pay disparities: I agree that social science can help study pay disparities: here the most important thing is not the statistical analysis (whether that be linear regression, instrumental variables, multilevel modeling, or whatever) but the measurements–but, yes, good social measurement is an important part of social science. For that matter, the social science of demography has been important to policymakers for centuries. So there are some things, I agree.
It could be true to say that a large part of the value of the sciences is realized through application but there are certainly contrary examples. Increased understanding of the evolution of life and of geological history for example, has value that feeds into fundamental human desires for understanding our origins and place in the universe. It also depends on whether you consider an “application” only in the engineering sense that you refer to (e.g. this would also apply to advances in medical interventions). But increased understanding of the natural world can have huge value in influencing the policies we make as individuals and societies even if it may have no direct application in the engineering sense; understanding of the consequences of greenhouse gas release, for example. Perhaps you could say that a policy made in response to scientific knowledge is an application?? This is seperate from the “relative value” discussion tho.
Since I’m doing my PhD in sociology, I want to defend my profession (a little).
No, not everything of sociology is total garbage! In fact, there is a branch of sociology that strictly adheres to the naturalistic approach to study the social world. These sociologists do experiments, they want to craft theories that have predictive power and they use statistics and fit models, sometimes even Bayesian models! Basically it is economics without formal behavioral models and with less fancy statistics.
In my view, sociology largely failed to develop theories that deserve to be called “theory”. Furthermore, most work, it seems to me, is indeed quite crappy. But, this is so in economics and psychology as well, so I guess sociology is in good company.
What branch of sociology adheres to a naturalistic approach? Here is Jonathan Turner’s view
https://www.ihatesociology.com/jonathan-turner-questions-and-answers
For example these guys here
https://www.academy-sociology.net/
That said, I don’t have any idea about the proportion of naturalistic sociologists (call them positivists) and non-naturalistic sociologists (call them anti-positivists). You could probably look at some leading sociology journals to see what type of work is published. I also don’t have much to say about the research quality of the anti-positivists; it does seem obscure to me, but I understand very little of it.
I think the problems of the positivist branch of sociology are much the same as in other social sciences: vague theories, vague measurements, largely arbitrary models that are being used to “test” theories etc. So not sure if I would single out sociology here. Then again, I don’t have a good overview about contemporary work in sociology, it could be worse, I just don’t know.
The interview is interesting, thanks. I mostly agree. There are some typos, for example “a hard social of the social universe” should probably read “a hard science of the social universe”. Also the interview gets a bit repetitive in the second half.
Anyways, there should be some quantification for the supposed ideological / non scientific turn sociology took. Do you know of any? Some text mining of curricula over the last 60 years for example, or mining abstracts to see which topics are being researched, with with methods etc.
Such analyses stratified by country would also be interesting. I’m from a rich European country and here society is also polarized, but the US seems more extreme. As a result sociology may be less ideological here as well.
Sociology is such a gigantic and all-encompassing field that it is very hard to characterize it. In every field there is lots of uninteresting and not useful work. I do think that in my experience sociology is a much less divided discipline than political science or economics. That wasn’t always true in the past. I mean even Jonathon Turner still is in a sociology department.
So one cranky person posts a complaint, we could find someone like that in any field.
Who in sociology “promotes right-wing racial and gender ideology”? It it a ‘vocal minority’ or a handful of people?
I came across this 1997 essay from a right wing extremist. No, wait, it is from the famously liberal feminist author Barbara Ehrenreich published in The Nation. She would be cancelled or deemed persona non grata if she published the same essay after 2015
https://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/Ehrenreich.html
Joey:
When I was referring to promotion of right-wing racial and gender ideology, I was mostly thinking of some psychologists and economists. They’re definitely a minority within those fields. Whether you want to label them as a “minority” or a “handful” is up to you. I’m not aware of many sociologists who have pushed a right-wing agenda. The only two I can think of are Peter Berger (see here) and Satoshi Kanazawa (see here). I’m sure that the vast majority of academic sociologists are politically on the left.
Thanks. To the best of my knowledge, Kanazawa’s degrees are in psych/evolutionary psych and he has no affiliation with soc. Berger is a celebrated sociologist and political moderate. Four of his articles critiquing sociology are here
https://www.ihatesociology.com/bibliography
There are some conservative sociologists here, but most of the criticism of the discipline (which is in a quiet civil war) is from centrists.
https://www.ihatesociology.com/faculty-testimonials
Joey:
Kanazawa’s Ph.D. is in sociology. He might call himself an evolutionary psychologist, but people can call themselves whatever they like. In any case, I agree that Kanazawa’s views are unusual among sociologists.
Turner’s website is mainly picking on a few graduate students, which I find really despicable. I don’t think that except in his tiny corner of the world there is a big debate — mostly everyone is unified in thinking of what he has done to a leading journal as terribly destructive.
As an old progressive, I say good on Barbara for going after the postmodernists. 1997 was just after they were exposed by Sokal hoax. What I don’t understand is how they recovered.
I don’t see anything that would get her “cancelled” in there. It’s a kind of normal discussion that people in sociology have and a fairly standard position.
“The utilitarian motivation for the social sciences is they can protect us from bad social-science reasoning”
Andrew: Your claim here is at odds with the historical record. The “utilitarian motivations” of the social sciences are indistinguishable from those of the natural sciences: to make us “healthier, happier, and more comfortable”.
To be sure, the social and natural sciences differ in almost every other important respect— accomplishments, practical benefits to society, etc. But their utilitarian motivations have always been the same. By the close of the 19th century the natural sciences had succeeded in harnessing the combined power of mathematics, refined measurement, precise instrumentation, and experimental procedure to identify and leverage universal laws of nature for practical purposes of prediction, control, and the development of new technologies. Psychology, meanwhile, had little more to show for several decades of laboratory-based introspection research than what William James ridiculed as “a mass of phenomenal description, gossip, and myth … (James,, 1892a, p. 146), “but not a single law in the sense in which physics shows us laws, not a single proposition from which any consequence can causally be deduced” (James. 1892b, p. 468). Dismissing the psychology of his day as “no science … only the hope of a science” (James, 1892b, p. 468), James understood that it was a distant hope for which there would be little patience in a rapidly expanding American society, where he found himself
“surrounded by an enormous body of persons … who are incessantly craving for a sort of psychological science which will teach them how to act… the kind of psychology which could cure a case of melancholy or charm a chronic insane delusion away … What every educator, every jail-warden, every doctor, every clergyman, every asylum-superintendent, asks of psychology is practical rules” James, 1892b, p. 148).
That was and remains the utilitarian motivation, vision, and promise to society, at least. The fact that they have and continue to act against their own self interests and those of society is another matter.
John
James, W. (1892a). Psychology – The briefer course. Henry Holt.
James, W. (1892b). A plea for psychology as a ‘natural science’. The Philosophical Review, 1(2), 146-153..pdf
Quote from the blog post: “Again, though, I have a nostalgia for the days when social science was legitimately believed to be directly useful in curing social ills.”
This reminded me of one of the many things I have wondered about in the last 13 years or so, which is that I have nostalgia for the days when I did not yet think social science may have facilitated and/or caused several and/or many social ills.
Andrew, haven’t you talked a lot about oversold social science like “Freakonomics” and “Nudge”? That sounds like social science which promises to be useful in curing social ills. A lot of popular psychology promises to fix your relationship with your date / parents / boss. McDonalds Peace Theory and Democratic Peace Theory were big in the 1990s. I doubt if psychology and sociology in the time of behaviourism and MK-ULTRA were any more rigorous, and I am sure that the people consuming the pop version were not more critical.
Sean:
In the above post, I referred nostalgically to “the hope and even the expectation that social science would address and help to solve major social problems such as poverty, crime, depression, war, and so forth.” When we look at oversold social science from the 2000-2020 period, things like Freakonomics, Nudge, Gladwell, power pose, etc. . . . sure, they were promising to be useful in curing social ills. But they were little things: increasing rates of signing up for savings plans, or getting kids to increase their vegetable consumption in school lunch, or helping people feel better in job interviews, or whatever. Nothing like ending poverty, crime, depression, and war.
I’m not saying that the earlier social science was successful at ending poverty, crime, depression, and war–I guess it had some partial successes and some failures–; I just have nostalgia for its ambitions. Even if Nudge etc. were real, the ambitions are small.