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Should social science be more solution-oriented?

Nature Human Behaviour volume 1, Article number: 0015 (2017) Cite this article

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Abstract

Over the past 100 years, social science has generated a tremendous number of theories on the topics of individual and collective human behaviour. However, it has been much less successful at reconciling the innumerable inconsistencies and contradictions among these competing explanations, a situation that has not been resolved by recent advances in ‘computational social science’. In this Perspective, I argue that this ‘incoherency problem’ has been perpetuated by an historical emphasis in social science on the advancement of theories over the solution of practical problems. I argue that one way for social science to make progress is to adopt a more solution-oriented approach, starting first with a practical problem and then asking what theories (and methods) must be brought to bear to solve it. Finally, I conclude with a few suggestions regarding the sort of problems on which progress might be made and how we might organize ourselves to solve them.

As a sociologist who spends a lot of time in the company of physicists, computer scientists and other outsiders to my field, I am often asked a question of the sort: “What is the social science perspective on X?”, where X is some topic of interest. To a social scientist, the question sounds hopelessly naïve: for any topic X, social science has dozens, if not hundreds, of perspectives, but no single perspective on which there is anything close to universal agreement. Nevertheless, I would argue that it is worth taking the question seriously, if only because it highlights an important difference between the social and physical/engineering sciences.

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  1. Microsoft Research, 641 Avenue of the Americas, 7th Floor, New York, 10011, New York, USA

    Duncan J. Watts

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Watts, D. Should social science be more solution-oriented?. Nat Hum Behav 1, 0015 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-016-0015

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