What’s wrong with social science today?
by Denyse O’Leary, MercatorNet:
Did it all begin with Margaret Mead’s giddy portrait of guilt-free promiscuity in the 1920s?
Recently, Japanese universities started moving away from liberal arts and social sciences , sending global “shivers down academic spines.” The official reason given was a need to focus on disciplines more needed by society.
There’s been considerable self-examination about the direction of science at the highest levels, including in recent editorials in top science journal Nature. That’s a good sign: we can’t fix what we can’t discuss.
Social science, our “science of us”, is more susceptible to self-deception than other sciences. It is very much softer than particle physics and it has been especially hard hit by recent scandals.
One factor may be the almost universally admitted progressive bias that makes frauds and hoaxes easy to perpetrate. There’s a technical term for that: “confirmation bias”, a tendency to attach more weight to evidence that confirms one’s own view. Much social science research seems to exist in order to provide evidence for theses that are already believed because they confirm the progressive worldview of the researchers.
This background is helpful in understanding the fate of whistleblowers in the field, including Mark Regnerus (an objective look at gay parenting, 2012). But long before that, there was Derek Freeman (an objective look at teen promiscuity, 1983). So when students sign up and pay for “social science” in the fall, what are they signing up for?
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