Because Social Scientists Help the Federal Government Address Problems Facing the Nation

September 30, 2026 by Wendy Naus

Federal agencies address issues that affect American life in critical ways. Fulfilling those missions requires tools only social science can provide. Congress passes laws to respond to what Americans need and want. Those laws promise Americans programs, protections, and services. Federal agencies then translate those laws into practices: what information to request from companies, what forms families complete to receive benefits, and what evidence shows that a drug's benefits outweigh its risks. Implementing these practices well requires ensuring that people can access, understand, and act on the information that they need. Behavioral and social scientists have unique expertise for ensuring those conditions are met and evaluating whether they are.

The articles collected in a recent special feature of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describe some of that work in five federal government agencies. That work reflects skills and knowledge that only specialized social science training can provide: nuanced sensitivity to the details of research design and interpretation and exposure to the cumulative wisdom of studies whose results are often surprising. The research described in these articles are drawn from years of experience helping federal agencies pursue their missions of improving Americans’ lives by addressing challenges in health, finance, commerce, and security. Scientists working with agencies do not set the goals; policymakers do. Social and behavioral scientists can help reach those goals and provide evidence about whether they are being reached. Below are brief summaries of three articles that illustrate the work and its impact.

Because Look at the Alternatives!

July 30, 2026 by Wendy Naus

Recent Gallup polling shows that Americans believe government dysfunction, skyrocketing costs of living, economic inequality, and healthcare affordability are the most critical challenges facing our nation. At their core, all these problems stem from human thoughts and actions.

Solving these crises requires us to change these human factors. To change them, we must understand them. Reversing economic inequality or fixing broken government institutions depends on understanding the levers that drive human beliefs and behaviors. This is the domain of the social and behavioral sciences. Just like the natural sciences, the social and behavioral sciences seek accurate measurements and empirical descriptions to design effective, real-life interventions.

What happens if we look elsewhere for solutions? Imagine a world completely devoid of the social and behavioral sciences, where policy is guided strictly by alternative forces.

Because Asking People Questions Provides Important and Necessary Insights

June 30, 2026 by Wendy Naus

Data are everywhere. Data are collected as we browse the internet, purchase items from stores, pay our taxes, go to the doctor’s office, enroll our children in school, and travel using a car or public transportation. But this outwardly observable information reflects only a small fraction of what humans do in a day, largely fails to reflect what we think and feel about our lives, surroundings, and futures, and does not capture why we think, feel, or do these activities. What is a researcher or policy maker to do when they need information that cannot be observed through records of people’s behavior? Long before digital traces of our lives were created to track everyday interactions, social, behavioral, and economic scientists used surveys to ask people about activities, opinions, and knowledge not easily found in records.

Survey questions can capture information about a population that cannot be known in any other way. Surveys conducted by the federal statistical system allow insights into whether someone is currently looking for work, but not employed, uses a doctor’s office versus urgent care clinic for health care, and even information about who lives in a household. Administrative data systems can be useful for understanding the quality of survey data, as some information is more reliable when found in records than survey reports. But survey data also provide insights into the quality of administrative data systems. For instance, while some might look to crime statistics based on police reports, less than half of violent crimes are reported to the police and police reporting varies dramatically across types of crimes and background characteristics of people. This information cannot be obtained from police records alone; we can only get it by asking people both about their victimization experiences and their reporting behavior. Even those who call for replacing or augmenting survey data, with administrative or commercial records or digital traces, typically require high-quality probability-based surveys for statistical adjustments. Probability-based surveys also are the benchmarks for evaluating the quality of estimates from administrative, commercial, and digital data.

Because It Helps Us Understand (and Change) Our Society

May 29, 2026 by Wendy Naus

It would be hard not to notice that we are living in a world of increasing inequality. According to data collected by the Federal Reserve, the share of the nation’s wealth owned by the top one percent of U.S. wealth holders increased almost 50 percent, from 22.8 percent in 1989 to 31.9 percent at the end of 2025. Meanwhile, the gap between high and low earners has also been expanding. One widely used measure is the ratio of wages of workers at the 90th percentile of the earnings distribution to those at the 10th percentile (the 90-10 gap). According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 90-10 gap was 3.7 in 1979 and grew to 5.0 by 2014, roughly where it is today.

This widening gap helps us understand why robust economic growth has not translated into more positive views about the economy. GDP per capita, the conventional scorecard of economic performance, has more than doubled since the mid-1980s. But, because of the growing income gap, this prosperity has not been widely shared. For example, adjusted for inflation, the real compensation of production workers today is no higher than it was in 1979 (see MeasuringWorth.com). This marks a major shift. In the 100 years from 1879 to 1979, the compensation of production workers grew at roughly the same rate as GDP per capita.

These facts both help us to understand our experience of the modern economy and raise a whole host of questions. Why are the fruits of economic growth increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few? Have there been other times when there has been a similar level of inequality? What can we learn from past experiences? What will happen in the future?

Because Reimagining Science Requires Behavioral and Social Scientists at the Table, Too

July 31, 2025 by Wendy Naus

Nearly 40% of deaths in the United States are preventable through changes in behavior. Modifiable risk factors like smoking, poor diet, inactivity, or alcohol use are contributors to many cancers. For children and teens ages 1 to 17, the leading cause of death is not disease…it’s gun violence. These are not problems with strictly biomedical solutions. They are deeply embedded in how people live, what they believe, and the environments they navigate every day. This is where behavioral and social science research (BSSR) provides answers. BSSR can examine individual characteristics and the broader contexts that shape health, or our “social determinants of health,” which either promote good health or exacerbate health disparities. Despite its enormous potential to improve lives, BSSR receives only a fraction of the funding and recognition given to biomedical research. In some cases, the use of terminology or phrases related to research on health disparities in a grant proposal have resulted in unfair termination of funding. If we want to understand not only today’s most pressing public health crises, but also the political moment science now finds itself in, we need scientists who ask the why’s and the how’s.

That belief is core to the work we do at Science for Good. As a co-founder of Science for Good, I aim to bridge the gap between public health and traditional science, ensuring that research extends beyond academia to benefit the communities it serves directly. I am committed to breaking down barriers and rebuilding trust by making scientific findings more understandable and actionable for those who need them most. I strive to reinforce that social and behavioral researchers are scientists too, and that our work serves a critical role in understanding, preventing, and addressing complex public health challenges.

Because People Can’t Be Represented If We Don’t Know What They Think

August 30, 2024 by Wendy Naus

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.

Because It Might Help Us Save American Democracy

May 31, 2024 by Wendy Naus

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).