The well-meaning but useless or counterproductive social science establishment

Part 1: 2020

Back in the dark days of April, 2020, a team of 42 social sciences published an article that began:

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behaviour with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping.

As I wrote at the time, The author list includes someone named Nassim, but not Taleb, and someone named Fowler, but not Anthony. It includes someone named Sander but not Greenland. Indeed it contains no authors with names of large islands. It includes someone named Zion but no one who, I’d guess, can dunk. Also no one from Zion. It contains someone named Dean and someone named Smith but . . . ok, you get the idea. It includes someone named Napper but no sleep researchers named Walker. It includes someone named Rand but no one from Rand. It includes someone named Richard Petty but not the Richard Petty. It includes Cass Sunstein but not Richard Epstein.

As befits an article with 42 authors, there were a lot of references: 6.02 references per author, to be precise. But, even with all these citations, I wasn’t quite sure where this research can be used to “support COVID-19 pandemic response,” as promised in the title of the article.

And the article got me angry. I’ll give some details in a moment, but here I just want to say that (a) I assume those 42 authors were sincerely trying to help the world, (b) their help was framed in terms of claims that social-science research by them and their friends would be helpful, and (c) I don’t think it was. Indeed, I’d argue that their work was counterproductive to the extent that it distracted policymakers from the real issues.

As I wrote back in 2000, my trouble with that 42-authored article is that many of its claims are so open-ended that they don’t tell us much about policy. For example, I’m not sure what we can do with a statement such as this:

Negative emotions resulting from threat can be contagious, and fear can make threats appear more imminent. A meta-analysis found that targeting fears can be useful in some situations, but not others: appealing to fear leads people to change their behaviour if they feel capable of dealing with the threat, but leads to defensive reactions when they feel helpless to act. The results suggest that strong fear appeals produce the greatest behaviour change only when people feel a sense of efficacy, whereas strong fear appeals with low-efficacy messages produce the greatest levels of defensive responses.

Beyond the very indirect connection to policy, I’m also concerned because, of the three references cited in the above passage, one is from PNAS in 2014 and one was from Psychological Science in 2013. That’s not a good sign!

Looking at the papers in more detail . . . The PNAS study found that if you manipulate people’s Facebook news feeds by increasing the proportion of happy or sad stories, people will post more happy or sad things themselves. The Psychological Science study is based on two lab experiments: 101 undergraduates who “participated in a study ostensibly measuring their thoughts about “island life,” and 48 undergraduates who were “randomly assigned to watch one of three videos” of a shill. Also a bunch of hypothesis tests with p-values like 0.04. Anyway, the point here is not to relive the year 2013 but rather to note that the relevance of these p-hacked lab experiments to policy is pretty low.

Also, the abstract of the 40-author paper says, “In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues.” But then the paper goes on to unqualified statements that the authors don’t even seem to agree with.

For example, from the article, under the heading, “Disaster and ‘panic’” [scare quotes in original]:

There is a common belief in popular culture that, when in peril, people panic, especially when in crowds. That is, they act blindly and excessively out of self-preservation, potentially endangering the survival of all. . . .However, close inspection of what happens in disasters reveals a different picture. . . . Indeed, in fires and other natural hazards, people are less likely to die from over-reaction than from under-reaction, that is, not responding to signs of danger until it is too late. In fact, the concept of ‘panic’ has largely been abandoned by researchers because it neither describes nor explains what people usually do in disaster. . . . use of the notion of panic can be actively harmful. News stories that employ the language of panic often create the very phenomena that they purport to condemn. . . .

But, just a bit over two moths earlier, one of the authors of that article wrote an op-ed titled, “The Cognitive Bias That Makes Us Panic About Coronavirus”—and he cited lots of social-science research in making that argument.

I don’t think social science research has changed so much between 28 Feb 2020 (when that pundit wrote about panic and backed it up with citations) and 30 Apr 2020 (when that same pundit coauthored a paper saying that researchers shouldn’t be talking about panic). And, yes, I know that the author of an op-ed doesn’t write the headline. But, for a guy who thinks that “the concept of ‘panic'” is not useful in describing behavior, it’s funny how quickly he leaps to use that word. A quick google turned up this from early 2016: “How Pro Golf Explains the Stock Market Panic.” I guess that, since the Democrats were in power at that time, he had to talk about volatility in the market as an illogical “panic” rather than a rational response to economic conditions.

All joking aside, this just gets me angry. They can go around promoting themselves and their friends with the PANIC headline whenever they want. But then in their review article, they lay down the law and tell us how foolish we are to believe in “‘panic.'” They get to talk about panic whenever they want, but when we want to talk about it, the scare quotes come out.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure these people mean well. They’re successful people who’ve climbed to the top of the greasy academic pole; their students and colleagues tell them, week after week and month after month, how brilliant they are. We were facing a major world event, they wanted to help, so they do what they can do. But sometimes the thing that you’re professionally trained to do, isn’t much help.

Interlude: The social-science establishment

We all like to use the term “establishment” to refer to powerful or influential people who we disagree with. But that’s not fair. “Rogue economist” Steven Levitt is part of the establishment (sorry, Steve!). I’m part of the establishment too. I can post grumpy blog entries every day between 9 and 10am eastern time until the end of my days and beyond, and I’m still an MIT-and-Harvard-educated Ivy League professor living a comfortable life and with more influence than most.

Indeed, back in 2020, I expressed agreement with another member of the establishment, University of Chicago political science professor Anthony Fowler, who, in a snappily-titled piece called, “Curing Coronavirus Isn’t a Job for Social Scientists,” wrote:

The public appetite for more information about Covid-19 is understandably insatiable. Social scientists have been quick to respond. . . . While I understand the impulse, the rush to publish findings quickly in the midst of the crisis does little for the public and harms the discipline of social science. . . . Even in normal times, social science suffers from a host of pathologies. . . . A global crisis only exacerbates these problems. . . . and the promise of favorable news coverage in a time of crisis further distorts incentives. . . .

Well put. So what does it mean that I’m the establishment, Anthony Fowler’s the establishment, and we’re arguing that those other 42 people in the establishment are wrong?

The key point, I think, is that the Gang of 42 is arguing, not just for specific ideas–indeed, I argued above that their ideas are not so coherent–but in support of the idea of the social-science establishment. That’s what they mean by saying, “insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behaviour with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts.”

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think the establishment has its uses–somebody has to run the journals, standardize the curricula, etc., indeed when I’m writing textbooks, my coauthors and I are making our bid to be part of that establishment, and I’m happy when that happens (as with Bayesian Data Analysis) and frustrated when we don’t fully succeed (as with Regression and Other Stories).

But in the case of covid policy, I think Anthony Fowler was right that social scientists should’ve backed off. And there I see a big problem with the social science establishment, which is that one of its major roles is . . . to promote itself. So to ask the establishment to chill out, to ask Cass Sunstein to, for just once in his life, not make a confident pronouncement or write a book telling everyone else how to think and behave, to tell policymakers that the solutions to their social-behavior problems will not be found in the latest issues of Psychological Science and PNAS . . . that’s a counter-establishment move.

Part 2: 2024

In the meantime, the rise of the political right has brought us what might be called a counter-establishment or new social science establishment that has all of the same problems of the old social science establishment–no, that’s not right, let me say it avoids some of those problems but has introduced its own problems–so we still have a lot to struggle against.

The old establishment had power pose and the collected works of Brian “pizzagate” Wansink. The new establishment has what might be called “podcast science”–cold showers and miracle cures–along with a soft spot for conspiracy theories such as the original Pizzagate story. The old establishment had the scientist as hero; the new establishment has the rich guy as hero. I don’t like either of those narratives.

There is some overlap: both the old and the new establishment are suckers for crude gender and racial essentialism as well as various goofy fallacies of measurement (the Implicit Association Test for the old establishment, finger measurements for the new establishment). Conceptually I don’t see much difference between ridiculous claims in Psychological Science about ovulation and voting, and the sorts of extreme gender essentialism that we hear about from podcasts–either way, it’s what we’ve called “schoolyard evolutionary biology.”

The people who say, “Pay Cass Sunstein more money invite him to more parties and he’ll help with our public health problems” are not the same people who say, “Cryptocurrency will solve our economic problems,” but I see a similarity: in both cases there’s a group with some political power and intellectual influence wielding some crude theories and spending lots of time promoting themselves.

If you look at the present post, I have a lot more to say in the “2020” section than the “2024” section. Part of that is the benefit of hindsight–most of the first section above is copied from my post from May, 2020, and I like what I said there–but most of it is that I’m a lot more familiar with the world of bad science in academia than I am with the world of bad science in the partisan conservative media, even though it is the latter that has more influence now. I’ll have to leave it to others to pick up that particular baton; here I just want to register my objection to well-meaning but useless or counterproductive social science establishments of all kinds, and I want to suggest that the lessons we have learned (or should’ve learned) from 2020 about distrusting the establishment should apply to the new establishment as well.

My message is not “don’t trust anybody,” and it certainly isn’t “don’t trust Ivy League professors” (as that would lead us straight to the paradox of the liar). And social science theories can be valuable for policy, including theories associated with the left, right, and center. But . . . hmmm, I’m not quite sure how to finish this paragraph. I’m not completely sure what my message here is, or should be. So let me just stop here. A luxury I have since I’m blogging, not writing a news article or journal article or book that needs to come to some coherent conclusion.