Every year on the third Thursday of February, we celebrate Anthropology Day—a chance to further our understanding of what it means to be human. Established by the American Anthropological Association, this day brings students, teachers, and professionals together to share how anthropology helps us explore cultures, societies, and human behavior. Anthropology isn’t just about studying ancient artifacts or faraway tribes; it’s about connecting the dots between the past and present, helping us make sense of how we live and interact today. In short, anthropology guides us towards a better understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Future graduates face complex global challenges like climate change, as well as ethical, social and cultural implications of emerging new technologies like artificial intelligence.

The urgency of these challenges — and the complexity of skills and capabilities needed to address them — has prompted a revisiting of the role of social sciences and humanities programs in equipping students for civic engagement and as future leaders.

At the heart of democratic governance is the notion that what government does should be responsive to what people want. To reflect citizens’ desires, political leaders need to have a sense of which policies most people would prefer, what kinds of concerns they have, and ideally why they are making the choices they are making. Public opinion polling is the primary vehicle through which the desires, hopes, and preferences of members of the public trickle up to influence the decisions of social and political leaders.

Institutions of governance in contemporary democracies offer citizens relatively limited opportunity to express their preferences and provide no meaningful mechanism for explaining those preferences to leaders. When voters enter the voting booth, they typically indicate who they think should represent them at various levels of government and sometimes also get to express up-or-down views on ballot initiatives. These choices are not particularly revealing about public desires. Election results don’t tell us who made which choices or what their motivations might have been. Indeed, knowing only who won does not reveal whether voters were expressing a preference for the candidate they chose or against that candidate’s opponent. So, although representatives often begin their terms in office asserting that they have a mandate to lead, the results of elections provide little insight into what, if anything, that mandate is for.

For empirical researchers in the social and behavioral sciences who focus on children, adolescents, and young adults, high-quality survey data are an essential ingredient for studying important scientific and policy research questions. Such data are a public good and foundational infrastructure for the social and behavioral sciences. They are the equivalent of the Hubble Telescope for researchers across all career stages—but especially for new and early-stage investigators. Survey data are typically offered to the research community as a free and shared resource that can answer an untold number of questions. Recent budget cutbacks, however, threaten the future of these essential data.

As the 2024 presidential election approaches, we are reminded that Americans are deeply polarized. But while the term “polarization” is widely used, with apologies to The Princess Bride, that word does not always mean what you think it means. The American public is not polarized in the sense that they are divided into two ideological camps with little middle ground (although that is the case for our politicians). Rather, they experience affective polarization, which refers not to their views on public policy—as Americans are generally centrists—but instead a personal dislike of people who support the “other” party. This is a relatively recent development, for as recently as the 1980s, partisan differences did not usually translate to personal antipathy. Nor is it limited to one party; Republicans and Democrats express nearly identical dislike of each another.

Healthy democratic systems feature competing visions of a good society, and that competition can be beneficial for society as a whole. At the same time, democracies require tolerance, trust, and cooperation to avoid the kind of toxic polarization that puts democracy itself at risk. Increasingly, the extent of affective polarization threatens American democracy. Different social groups (such as liberals and conservatives or Democrats and Republicans) not only differ and disagree with one another but also come to deeply dislike and derogate one another.

Before turning to the question of what can be done to curb destructive forms of polarization, it is necessary to understand the ways in which liberal-leftists and conservative-rightists differ from one another. More than 20 years of research in political psychology finds that liberal-leftists and conservative-rightists differ in many ways when it comes to attitudes, values, personality characteristics—including authoritarianism and social dominance orientation—and system justification tendencies. For example, there is a significant divide over the values of equality and tradition. As people become more and more conservative, they value tradition more and equality less, and as people become more and more liberal, they value tradition less and equality more. Research carried out all over the world shows that leftists prioritize harmony, benevolence, and universalism, whereas rightists prioritize power, conformity, security, tradition, and self-interest (read more).

On April 8-9, 2024, over 60 social and behavioral science researchers, students, and advocates from 18 different states participated in Social Science Advocacy Day. This annual event, the 10th annual organized by in the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), brings together advocates from across the country to discuss with Members of Congress and their staff the importance of prioritizing funding for federal agencies and programs that support social and behavioral science research. Below are reflections from three advocates who participated: Emma Southern, an undergraduate student at American University; Dr. Laura Widman, Associate Professor of Psychology at North Carolina State University, and the founder of Teen Health Research, Inc.; and Dr. Aaryn L. Green, Interim Director of Research, Professional Development, and Academic Affairs at the American Sociological Association.

Artificial Intelligence – “AI” – continues to be the subject of hot debate around the world as governments seek ways to regulate it to protect the public, and developers continue to push towards AI with more human-like capabilities. What’s at stake depends on who you listen to: some extoll the benefits of AI to “transform” the way we live and work, downplaying the potential for negative impacts on society, while others warn of an existential threat to humanity.  Most perspectives land somewhere in between. We see AI, like other technological advances before it, as an exciting tool with tremendous potential. As such, it is not inherently helpful or harmful: its impacts depend on how it is used. Now is the perfect time for the thoughtful and extensive integration of social science evidence and expertise into AI development, deployment, implementation, and use so that AI can be optimally, positively effective while minimizing risks of harm to society.

AI has existed in various forms for decades and until recently, was developed under tightly constrained parameters to do specific tasks. However, the 2022 launch of easy-to-access Large Language Model (LLM) tools such as ChatGPT, which input massive amounts of data and generate responses to questions in conversational language, had leaders across many sectors – from education to business – scrambling to set guidelines and parameters for AI’s use in their domains. Indeed, AI and other technologies are not typically implemented in isolation but in systems. Social science approaches can help us understand and address these technologies’ reach, implications, and impact within these “AI systems.”

We know that social and behavioral science (SBS) has a hold on the conversation when institutional and government decision-makers parley over what goes into ‘policy.’ But oftentimes the SBS researchers whose own work goes into policy are unaware that they’re making an impact in the real world and are stymied from amplifying their findings or using them to advance their careers or fields.

With this in mind, Sage partnered with Overton to create Sage Policy Profiles, a free-to-use tool that enables researchers to discover the real-world impact – drawing from a pool of more than 10 million policy documents – of their work on policy, visualize, export, and share what they find.

In light of this launch, I sat down with Euan Adie, founder of Altmetric and Overton and currently Overton’s managing director, to learn more about the outsized impact that SBS makes on policy and his work creating tools to connect the scholarly and policy worlds.

There is a growing recognition in the scientific community that health research is richer when it incorporates the perspectives of those with lived experience.

What is lived experience? It is the unique expertise provided by individuals who have been directly affected by specific health issues. It could come from a patient or their caregiver, or from members of a community who have experienced something collectively, such as adverse health effects from contaminated drinking water. Those with lived experience hold powerful insights that can help improve health systems, research, and policy.

For those reading nearly any media outlet during 2023, it is hard to miss the fact that Artificial Intelligence (AI)–in all its varied manifestations–is a regularized component of public discussion and debate. The celebrated and feared emergence of ChatGPT in late 2022, the Writers Guild of America strike and the concerns that writing would cease to be a human endeavor, and the recent firing and subsequent rehiring of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman clearly illustrate that AI is having a moment. So much so that prediction and forecasting site Metaculus is tracking to see if Time's person of the year for 2023 will be AI. Honestly, it is hard to argue against this idea. But before we get too far down a path of contending and arguing that an AI revolution will fundamentally transform the world in which we live, perhaps we should consider what social science can tell us and has told us about the longitudinal impacts of technological change on society. The interdisciplinary world of Science & Technology Studies can provide a window into how new and emerging technologies impact how we live on the planet.

Science & Technology Studies as a field of inquiry that emerged in the middle of the twentieth century, bringing together those interested and invested in better understanding the ways science and technology impacted society. Situated within broader discussions about science "and" society, and science "for" society, early work–exemplified by Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions–aimed to reveal the deep social roots of scientific discovery and technological innovation.

Universities have the resources to help combat the climate crisis. What’s more, they have a responsibility to their students – who want to take action, but may lack the support they need to do so.

One way universities can do this is to help students use their skills to contribute to university- and community-wide projects. This can create real change, as well as teaching students how to take collaborative action.

In 2019, we started a research project with colleagues at York St John University to find out what students felt about the climate crisis. To begin, we held focus groups with 23 students who had responded to a call for participation posted on social media and around the campus.

Read the full article on The Conversation.

Every 2 years, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) within the National Science Foundation (NSF) publishes a congressionally mandated report on the demographic makeup of the population working in and studying science and engineering (S&E). For decades, the employment section of this report largely focused on those working in S&E occupations, which generally require at least a 4-year degree. However, a thriving economy is served by a wide array of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) jobs that may not require a bachelor’s degree—from electricians to technicians to construction workers. Historically, these professions were not included in NCSES analyses, leaving a notable gap in our understanding of the STEM enterprise.

On April 24-25, 2023, over 50 social and behavioral science researchers, students, and advocates from 11 different states participated in Social Science Advocacy Day. This annual event, organized by in the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), brings together advocates from across the country to discuss with Members of Congress and their staff the importance of funding federal agencies and programs that support social and behavioral science research. This year was COSSA’s first in-person Social Science Advocacy Day since 2019. Below are reflections from three advocates who participated: Brenna Tosh, an undergraduate student at Cornell University; Dr. Nicole R. Stokes, Dean for Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Pennsylvania State University at Abington; and Dr. Deborah Carr, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Innovation in Social Science at Boston University.

America’s gun death rate is unacceptably high – it is well beyond that of any other developed country.  In 2020, there were 45,222 gun related deaths, with 24,264 (54%) of those being suicides and 20,958 (46%) being homicides.  Within America, gun violence is the leading cause of death for children (defined as persons being under the age of 18), and it is among the top 5 causes of death of those under the age of 44.  These staggering statistics are why many social scientists have labeled American gun violence a “public health crisis”.

While these numbers are staggering and the loss of life profound, there is good news. Gun violence is preventable and, in particular, the tools from the social sciences can help us reduce and prevent gun violence.  Social science offers a broad array of skills to inform solutions and each social science tool is necessary.  Due to the enormity and complexity of gun violence, the many disciplines of social science must be used in conjunction with each other to effectively prevent gun violence. 

Interventions designed to keep people safe can have hidden side effects. With an increased perception of safety, some people are more likely to take risks.

For example, some vehicle drivers take more risks when they are buckled up in a shoulder-and-lap belt. Some construction workers step closer to the edge of the roof because they are hooked to a fall-protection rope. Some parents of young children take less care with medicine bottles that are “childproof” and thus difficult to open.

Techniques designed to reduce harm can promote a false sense of security and increase risky behavior and unintentional injuries.

As civil engineers and applied behavioral scientists, we are interested in ways to improve workplace safety. Our ongoing research suggests that employers need to do more than provide injury-protection devices and mandate safety rules and procedures to follow. Job-site mottos like “safety is our priority” are not enough. Employers need to consider the crucial human dynamic that can counteract their desired injury-prevention effects – and tap into strategies that might get around this safety paradox.

Read the full article on The Conversation.

When it comes to opinion research, it sometimes isn’t just a matter of meeting scientific standards, but about assuaging doubts about whether measuring should be done at all. This is especially true these days when questions have been raised about the accuracy of scientific polling in recent elections. Some of the criticisms made after the 2016 and 2020 elections were helpful, and survey researchers responded as scientists —reviewing their methods and making improvements where necessary and possible. Other criticisms are often the result of disappointment with what public opinion research reports. Like election denial, disappointment with a preferred outcome causes some people to question legitimate results. Of course, we all know that polls are a snapshot in time and opinions can change — and have changed — dramatically following major events. In 2022, pre-election polls gave Americans an accurate sense of who was favored in the elections and how public evaluations of them were changing as the election approached. They also underscored those elections where polls were just too close to say what might happen (and the days of vote counting after November 8 underscored the accuracy of many close pre-election polls).

As a new school year begins, it is understandable that students, parents, teachers and the community at large experience both excitement and apprehension. Excitement about a new year of in-person learning, reconnecting with old friends and making new ones, but apprehension about the safety of the school environment. The possibility of school violence occupies the minds of many. While the risk of mass shootings in schools remains exceedingly low, it is essential that we draw on the best data and research available to prevent such events and mitigate all manner of threats to school and student safety.

As the directors of two federal agencies tasked with collecting crime and justice data and advancing scientific research to enhance public safety and the administration of justice, we want to highlight some of what we know about school safety and mass shootings.

Gun control legislation almost never passes Congress, even when there is widespread public support for action in the wake of mass shootings such as those in Buffalo and Uvalde. That’s why we did not expect that on June 25, 2022, President Joe Biden would sign into law a bill containing a set of gun reform provisions known as the “Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.” Based on our expertise studying public opinion and the U.S. Congress, here are four reasons we believe some gun control measures got enacted this time around.

Read the full article on The Conversation.