As If “Social” Sciences Aren’t “Hard” Enough
Growing up, I was always good at math and science. I was in programs for gifted children like GATE and GEMS and always took the Honor and AP versions of my math and science classes. I loved Biology and Chemistry and Calculus and (sometimes) even Physics. So when it came time to apply to universities and choose my major and a path for my future, my entire family was disappointed when I said I wanted to go into Sociology. “Why would you throw away your talent like that?” they would say. “What are you going to do with that?” They made me feel like I was doing nothing or choosing the easy way out and that I was choosing a path that was essentially worthless. I will be honest, at the time, I was worried about it too. I took second quarter calculus for fun my first year and got one of the highest grades in the class on the midterm. My discussion section was with a Math and Science Learning Community and they asked me what my major was, guessing things like mathematics, physics, and engineering. When I told them I was a Sociology major, they acted confused. “Why?” they asked, “if you’re good at math why would you choose a social science?” I felt like I was somehow not reaching my potential. I second-guessed my decisions.
It took me a long time to realize why people reacted the way that they did when I told them my major, and why I always felt the need to justify to them that, no, I really was “smart enough” I just chose this major because I wanted to do Criminal Psychology. The more Sociology classes I took, the more I fell in love with it as its own discipline and, ironically enough, the more I understood about why people write off the social sciences. Inherently, social sciences are the study of human beings but they are far more theoretical and examine the self in a more abstract way than, say, biology. Psychology being the study of the mind, overlapping with Neuroscience but somehow being “less important,” Sociology involving huge amounts of statistical analysis and yet being devalued because it studies human behaviors in groups, and others taking the same approach to Economics, Anthropology, and Philosophy. They are studies that involve human beings, social interaction, thoughts and emotions, and generally important aspects of life that are harder to quantitatively measure, but why do we think this makes them easy?
One of my favorite comments devaluing the social sciences is that they are “just common sense.” I say “favorite” because it is one I hear so often that I have learned to laugh at how wrong it is. I think this misconception comes from the fallacy that human beings inherently know everything there is to know about our own behavior (HAH! Like you’ve never done something and then spent an hour asking yourself “why!?”) but also because the words you can use to describe social science is very commonplace. There are of course the “Fathers of Sociology” whose theory is dense with new made-up words that are hard to understand, but that I think stems from these “Fathers” trying to establish themselves as a science like Comte and Spencer did for their entire lives, comparing sociology to biology and physics and trying to create an academic language that would be hard to understand so that students would have to be taught this language in order to understand, effectively excluding those who did not know this academic terminology and making the social sciences seem more legitimate by being more exclusive. In a more practical and modern sense, sociology and psychology and philosophy can be explained using much more basic vocabulary and palatable language, but that seems to make people assume that the concepts being described must also be basic, and that simply isn’t true (otherwise trying to explain systematic racism and institutionalized misogyny to others would be far easier and nobody would still dare to deny their existence). Heather Cardenas says in the beginning of her article “Academic Language and a Case of Reverse Infiltration” that women and feminists need to infiltrate other disciplines through language and disrupt language in order to make academia more accessible and disrupt the educational hierarchy. Social sciences, in a sense, are already fields where the academic language can easily be — and IS easily — broken down to be easier to digest by those who may not have the formal education necessary to understand excessively complicated academic language. So is breaking down this unnecessary hierarchy what causes society to devalue the very sciences that examine it? Partially so, yes.
Another aspect is simply institutionalized misogyny and the devaluing of femininity. Social behavior is generally seen as a feminine characteristic, and women are “supposed to be” good at socializing and maintaining interpersonal relationships. So when it comes to psychology and discussing emotions as scientific concepts, our masculinity-praising society naturally places it lower on the hierarchy than mixing chemicals in a lab. Despite theory and hypotheses being a hugely important part of the scientific method the “hard” sciences hold so dear, when that theory and this abstract analysis is based anywhere in human behavior and better understanding ourselves, the hegemonic masculinity that governs our scientific academia can’t handle the association with feminine qualities and must immediately illegitimate the social sciences. Now is this the last of it? No, not quite.
It’s not just easy-to-understand language or the “feminine” nature of the social sciences that causes them to be associated more with art than with science, but also the kind of learning environments and behaviors that are of utmost importance in studies of this nature. Discussion-based learning and the concept of there not being a singular “truth” or “fact,” but rather many ways of looking at the same thing tends to freak people out. People are attached to their ability to know something for certain (despite the fact that hard sciences are always discovering new things and changing ideas they once believed to be undeniable) and this comes partially from our over-inflated sense of self-importance (an important part of hegemonic masculinity). Admitting that you don’t know everything is seen as a sign of weakness, and social sciences are all about continuing to learn and do more studies because society is always changing and there is always more to learn. So social science and the ideal that even the teachers are still learning is intimidating to those who are still striving for that fragile masculinity. This, to others, might seem like social sciences might not have anything to “know,” but in fact knowing that you don’t know everything is the best way to keep an open mind and stay alert to changes and new aspects of the environment to continue doing research to learn more. Professors being able to learn from their students, as described in Heather Cardenas’ other article about feminist architecture and its important value in the classroom, is an important aspect of social sciences as fields and is fostered through the very feminist architecture that she describes.
So it isn’t just the neglect of overly-complicated academic language or the perceived femininity of the social sciences or even the constant strive to learn more through the disregard of the idea that one individual can “know it all” for a fact that causes our masculinity-based society to devalue the social sciences, but rather a mix of all three of those and more. Social science has been fighting for its legitimacy since it was conceived, but going about it in all the wrong ways. Instead of having these “Fathers of Sociology” that fought to be a “hard science” and having Freud be the first psychologist kids learn to recognize, let us embrace our difference and move away from the problematic and exclusive aspects of the hard sciences and into our own, inclusive and non-elitist conversation about the world. Let us not compare ourselves to our biology-major classmates and wonder why we chose the “inferior” major or let people dismiss the complex ideas of social sciences as “common sense” merely because we choose to use language that is accessible even to people who are disenfranchised by the very social inequality systems that we examine. Let us move away from the “Fathers” of these social sciences as the founders or authorities about societies that have changed so much since their writings and instead embrace what makes us different and what makes us work against the social inequality we study. As Carla Lonzi says, “Let’s Spit on Hegel” and other social scientists of the past who wanted to participate in the exclusive and hierarchical academic atmosphere that is so elitist and pompous. Let’s continue on our path of valuing our “feminine” qualities while analyzing that gender is merely a social construct anyway and including the non-alligned majorities in the world in our mutually educational conversations about what does and doesn’t work for them in our society instead of letting conversations about inequality be dominated by wealthy, heterosexual, white cis-gender men.
