Behavioral and Social Science 50 Years of Discovery (1986) / Chapter Skim
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Introduction
Introduction
Pages 1-18
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" ~ The focus of this distinguished committee of social scientists (the term behavioral science had not yet gained currency) and the hundreds of consultants who contributed to the report was to document the state of the nation, especially in terms of changing institutions, and to make such recommendations as seemed appropriate for public policy or private action.
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. There was also strong behavioral and social science representation during this period in the work of special-purpose national commissions on such subjects as pornography, law enforcement and criminal justice, and marijuana and drug abuse.
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These methods of gathering, organizing, and querying data cut much closer than before to the core of individual and collective human behavior, enabling researchers and others who use the methods to look into ranges of phenomena not hitherto accessible to direct observation, analysis, or experiment. Examples of these methodological advances are numerous.
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The classical traditions of Western thought that dominated behavioral and social theory earlier in the century insisted either that subjective phenomena were immediate reflections of material reality, simply summarizing objective experience, or that subjective phenomena formed a separate and mysterious realm, inaccessible to measurement or rigorous analysis. In contrast, many current theories and empirical inquiries guided by them involve an increasingly detailed picture of the origins, character, and relations between people's internal representations, values, and attachments, and their behavior toward objects, institutions, and persons.
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In the social engineering view, objective facts ultimately govern social action, whereas researchers now see factual knowledge as only one component in a complicated set of determining processes. Rather than taking facts as eternal truths residing in the world waiting to be observed, facts are now understood as compelling interpretive statements reached by comparing the results of more or less precise measurements undertaken within a theoretical scheme.
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Reiss concludes that current studies of social change could be improved by attending more to organizational and other collective variables in contrast to the prevalent bias toward measures of individual behaviors, and by reorienting various aspects of the national statistical system. Such reorientation might not only provide better indications about domestic social trends but also aid in comparisons between the United States and other advanced industrial societies.
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Klein traces the beginning of macroeconomic model-building from the 1930s. Macroeconomic models as we know them now, involving hundreds of aggregate equations and frequently updated series of economic indicators,
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; the shift in consumer purchasing patterns from perishables to durables, whose replacement could easily be postponed, making consumer markets far more volatile; excessive business investment in mergers, the creation of holding companies, and other financial combinations; poor banking practices, particularly the willingness to devote ever-increasing credit resources to loans on real estate and industrial securities (these, in turn, being subject to episodes of speculative frenzy) and to extension of consumer credit; an overall depression of agricultural prices; and an "unsound international commercial policy" based ultimately on the need of defeated Germany to finance enormous war reparations.
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Numbers or, more exactly, statistical systems that count various aspects of social action and provide numerical indicators of what is occurring in society play an essential role in at least three underpinnings of successfully democratic states: as vehicles for assessing the performance of government policies and programs; as ways of setting agendas by identifying or documenting particular interests; and as instruments for allocating government resources, for example, by statistical definitions of rights or entitlements, as in the allocation of federal funds according to "percentages of people living below the poverty line" in a congressional district. Prewitt indicates that social scientists who develop statistical methods and datagathering surveys essentially for research purposes are also by virtue of this professional expertise the "keepers of the number system," responsible for seeing that the best kind of counting is done.
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LaFree review recent studies on the power and limits of induced change in formal criminal justice operations to deter street crime and drunk driving. They emphasize how the public perception versus the organizational actuality of criminal sanctions can effect the results of changes in the law.
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Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky investigate the ways in which individual decisions are influenced by persistent attitudes on risk-taking and the value of gains versus losses, as well as by variable ways to construct mental accounts of personal behavior, such as expenditure decisions. Kahneman and Tversky see a smooth relationship between the rationalist principles of decisionmaking formulated in the eighteenth century by Bernoulli and the prescriptive theories of rational choice propounded by van Neumann and Morgenstern in 1947.
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The psychophysics of chance and value cause people to over value what they already have compared with what they would pay to obtain the same possessions or chances anew and to engage in anomalous spending behavior depending on how, in their own minds, they think about each expenditure: as a direct trade-off of one purchase for another; as the current cost of the item relative to a possibly higher or lower cost at another place or time; or as a net reduction in their overall assets. DISCOVERING THE MIND AT WORK The research covered by Kahneman and Tversky reveals an important analytical linchpin in theories on how individual choices are composed into social, political, and economic trends: the assumption of rationality as a characteristic of the sovereign consumer, autonomous citizen, or competent manager or worker.
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His report urged more scientific study of education but nearly all the attention to research stressed the move to less formal teaching methods in lieu of recitation and rote and the use of psychological tests to assess the state of learning of the individual student. Other chapters on the family, youth, and childhood paid little attention to cognitive matters, concentrating instead on personality and child welfare.
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. Michael Studdert-Kennedy analyzes current understanding of the manner in which humans encode and decode words, phrases, and meaningful communications from the highly complex and variable tones of speech and motions of sign languages, and he reviews the evidence that linguistic competence, the ability to make these reversible codifications between ideas and expressions, is a distinct "module" in the brain.
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Studdert-Kennedy points to the importance of a few revolutionary advances in theory and methods in the study of language: the invention in the 1940s of the sound spectrograph and related mechanical devices to record and display detailed data on sound patterns; Chomsky's theories of syntactic structure in the l950s; and the linguistic study of sign language beginning in the 1960s. In each instance, the advance broke open an older tradition that had considered the task of the brain in producing and decoding speech a conceptually simple one, learned by associative principles that activated the wiring pattern of the brain, which in turn was directly linked to the organs of speech production (mouth and throat)
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The social sciences have striven to incorporate the varieties of observed social form as intrinsic parts of social theory, and behavioral sciences have focused on the real complexity of reproducible mental and physical performance. Both have participated in and benefited from the advances of modern mathematics and electronics, and both have generated new inventions that have diffused widely through modern society.
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REFERENCES Advisory Committee on Government Programs in the Behavioral Sciences 1968 Behavioral Science and the Federal Government. National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences.
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