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Why Your Company Needs Social Scientists
They’re uniquely equipped to map how users interface with digital technology.
The tech industry has always had a curious relationship with social scientists. As a PhD student in sociology in 2010, I remember hearing professors discuss the “Xerox Parc days”: starting in the late 1970s, anthropologists helped technologists encounter their machines in more natural habitats beyond the lab. Since then, social scientists of all kinds — sociologists, economists, psychologists, you name it — began working alongside technology entrepreneurs. Startups who “made it” in the tech sector had done their research, so to speak.
As the industry reached another boom in the 2000s, perceptions of research in the tech sector started to change. Consider Silicon Valley, the HBO show many of us in the tech industry lament is often painfully on the mark. In one episode, the members of this startup were confused as to why people weren’t sticking around after trying their platform. So they held a focus group. The team watched behind a one-way mirror as people shared their opinions about using what they built. The CEO got so frustrated with the feedback that he left his hidden seat from behind the window and stormed in to try to convince them that they were wrong.
