Why Green with Envy?

Social science should look at its prolific academic tradition and overcome its envy towards physics. Even though adopting ‘hard’ scientific methods have improved --even validated-- some social science processes, historically the core of social science knowledge has come from philosophical thoughts. While the natural-physical world can be explained better through empirical tests, some of the most reveling ideas we share as society have come from philosophy or literature. Mental constructions happen to be as important as the physical world for societies. People in power take radical decisions and transform civilizations based on their ideas, believes or perceptions. Those choices don’t have anything to do with hard science. That explains why scientists continue to cite Orwell’s 1894 to illuminate the control of states vs. privacy or Shakespeare’s Macbeth to understand tyranny.

Professors Kevin Clarke and David Primo hit the nail on the head when they invite social science researchers to think  “deeply about what prompts human beings to behave the way they do” instead of copying hard scientific methods to validate everything they do.