Why Is It Hard to Make Progress in the Social Sciences?
In today’s world, we are witnessing remarkable advancements in some areas while others seem to lag behind. Our society is continuously making progress in fields such as technology, medicine, and engineering, with faster and cheaper computers and more realistic video games becoming the norm. However, there seems to be little improvement in other aspects of our lives, such as building meaningful relationships, falling in love, and achieving happiness. Likewise, we are not making significant progress in combating addiction and aligning our behavior with our desired values.
While social science has made significant advances, such as priming in social psychology, capitalism in economics, or the recent rise in big data analysis from computational sociology, these pale in comparison to the revolutionary discoveries made by the natural sciences, such as General Relativity, the Theory of Evolution, or the Periodic Table.
According to computational social scientists at ETH Zurich, social science’s slower progress is due to fragmentation. While the natural sciences are unified under sweeping theories supported by rigorous evidence, the social sciences are often fragmented into competing theories. This leads scientists to work in isolation, away from critical discussion and disagreement. However, this hampers scientific progress. The researchers suggest that social scientists break free from their schools and seek out discussion and disagreement to foster scientific progress.
Another reason why it is so hard to make any progress in the social sciences compared to the natural sciences is the fact that it is almost impossible to fully control any experience in the social sciences. This leads to problems with replicability, which often discards “great breakthroughs” in the social sciences because others weren’t able to replicate the results in a lab. Problems like these don’t exist (at least, it is much easier to control variables) in the natural sciences, where each experiment can be conducted in the safety of one’s laboratory. In the social sciences, on the other hand, the whole world is often the laboratory. This, along with the fact that human cultures, social structures, and communities are often irrational and don't obey universal laws (as can often be seen in the natural sciences), makes any progress in the social sciences really hard to achieve.
Many suggest that social sciences should follow the example of natural sciences and try to objectify the results as much as possible and adopt a scientific, evidence-based method while conducting research. This might seem like a good idea at first. But in the long run, it may not be a reliable approach because it is much easier to predict the projectile motion of a ping pong ball than to understand the intricate reasons why people fall in love or why the world economy is failing to meet expectations.
For now, we can only hope that a new framework will be developed to make the process of scientific advancement in the social sciences as effective and productive as that of the natural sciences, and maybe one day we’ll be able to discover the Periodic Table of the social sciences.
Thanks for reading! If you’re interested in making a positive impact in the world, I highly recommend checking out the Effective Altruism website. There, you’ll find ways to do the most good with limited resources and make your contribution to solving some of the world’s most pressing problems. 😊 🌍
