The Importance of Social Science Education

While policymakers around the world often stress the importance of STEM education, it is less common to hear them speak about the importance of social science education, which is no less important. The social sciences are a collection of academic fields that systematically examine human social behavior to obtain generalizable conclusions about it, lying partway between the humanities and the natural sciences. While there is still some debate regarding what disciplines make up the social sciences, most would agree that sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics are the core social sciences, with linguistics, management science, communication, human geography, and some branches of archaeology and history also being included.

Having a solid social science education is important for everyone, including for researchers in all fields, because it can help people better understand and contextualize their behavior and their work. Below are four ways in which the social sciences are an important part of a researcher’s well-rounded education.

1. The social sciences encourage critical thinking and the questioning of assumptions.
In the same way that STEM education encourages curiosity about the natural world, social science education encourages curiosity about the social world. One of the core tenets of the social sciences is that nearly everything is influenced by human social behavior, and that all assumptions, no matter how small, should be examined. What many people think of as “common knowledge” regarding human behavior is often incorrect or contradictory; for example, the contradictory proverbs “birds of a feather flock together” and “opposites attract” are both examples of common knowledge regarding human behavior. The social sciences encourage people to not accept facts such as these at face value and to think more deeply about what is true and under what conditions (most social science research agrees that “birds of a feather flock together” is ultimately the more accurate proverb, and there is even a social scientific term for this phenomenon: homophily).

In the same way that STEM encourages people to challenge their assumptions about the natural world, the social sciences encourage people to do the same about the social world, which is not only helpful in navigating life, but also for understanding the broader context of one’s work and social position. In this way, a social science education can provide researchers with new tools to put their work in a different context, and thus to gain new insights about it, and maybe even to improve it.

2. The social sciences provide people with the tools to put their work into a social context.
One of the most important contributions of the social sciences is the development of conceptual tools and frameworks that allow people to better understand how larger social forces affect them, and vice-versa. Though a natural scientist may seem to be isolated, spending ten hours a day in a lab or ten weeks straight in the field, they are actually embedded in a complex network of social interactions and dependencies; the manufacturers that supply the lab equipment, the complex hierarchies of a lab or research group, the constant demands and pressures applied by university administrators, the stipulations of funding, and the support of peers and friends all play a role not only in the type of research that an individual conducts, but also in its quality and impact on the world.

A solid grounding in the social sciences can help a researcher consider and navigate the myriad social factors that influence their work and career and help them see how their work fits into a broader social context. It can also help researchers understand how social changes and current events will affect their research; the social sciences are well equipped to answer questions about how changes in government funding policies will impact research productivity and how a war halfway across the world will shift institutional research priorities.

3. The social sciences can help people better understand STEM.
Science and engineering are social endeavors, and the social sciences can provide insights into how research is conducted that goes beyond the commonly accepted practices of a field. In fact, there are entire branches of the social sciences, most notably science and technology studies (STS) and the sociology of knowledge, that explore the social aspects of how science is done through collaborations between natural, physical, and social scientists. The social sciences, and particularly STS, can help researchers better understand the history of their field, the origins of its common practices and standards, and even how it is that the scientific community decides that something is known. A solid grounding in the social sciences can help researchers to develop more effective and inclusive institutions and laboratories by applying insights from STS and from other social science fields, such as organizational studies.

The social sciences can also help you better understand the differences between academic cultures, as well as how these not only affect career trajectories, but also the very way that knowledge is constructed and evaluated. The sociology of knowledge can provide powerful insights in this area, including into questions regarding how laboratory leadership styles impact output, how different hierarchical relationships within and around laboratories affect the structure of entire fields, and how different sources of funding shape what questions are asked and answered. A starting point for further exploration into STS and the sociology of knowledge is the foundational book Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge by Karin Knorr Cetina, which explores the differences in how science is organized, performed, and evaluated in the fields of biology and physics through close ethnographies of two laboratories.

4. The social sciences can help people understand the impact of their work.
Science does not happen in a vacuum, and the social sciences can not only help researchers understand how social forces impact their work, but also how their work impacts social structures. A social science education will help researchers better understand how their work will be used, by whom it will be used, and what implications this will have for people. For example, the social sciences can help researchers think about the hazards of artificial intelligence in scholarly publishing and then help them find ways to reduce the negative impacts of their research while increasing its positive impacts. While no one can control the ways in which their work will be used, a thorough understanding of the institutions and people disseminating their work and providing their funding can help them better understand and control the impact of their work, and thus exert more control over their career and the legacy of their research.

Both STEM and social science education are important in the development of well-rounded individuals, and a solid grounding in the social sciences can not only help researchers better understand their work, but also help them further their careers.