Future graduates face complex global challenges like climate change, as well as ethical, social and cultural implications of emerging new technologies like artificial intelligence.

The urgency of these challenges — and the complexity of skills and capabilities needed to address them — has prompted a revisiting of the role of social sciences and humanities programs in equipping students for civic engagement and as future leaders.

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.

For empirical researchers in the social and behavioral sciences who focus on children, adolescents, and young adults, high-quality survey data are an essential ingredient for studying important scientific and policy research questions. Such data are a public good and foundational infrastructure for the social and behavioral sciences. They are the equivalent of the Hubble Telescope for researchers across all career stages—but especially for new and early-stage investigators. Survey data are typically offered to the research community as a free and shared resource that can answer an untold number of questions. Recent budget cutbacks, however, threaten the future of these essential data.

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).

On April 8-9, 2024, over 60 social and behavioral science researchers, students, and advocates from 18 different states participated in Social Science Advocacy Day. This annual event, the 10th annual organized by in the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), brings together advocates from across the country to discuss with Members of Congress and their staff the importance of prioritizing funding for federal agencies and programs that support social and behavioral science research. Below are reflections from three advocates who participated: Emma Southern, an undergraduate student at American University; Dr. Laura Widman, Associate Professor of Psychology at North Carolina State University, and the founder of Teen Health Research, Inc.; and Dr. Aaryn L. Green, Interim Director of Research, Professional Development, and Academic Affairs at the American Sociological Association.

Artificial Intelligence – “AI” – continues to be the subject of hot debate around the world as governments seek ways to regulate it to protect the public, and developers continue to push towards AI with more human-like capabilities. What’s at stake depends on who you listen to: some extoll the benefits of AI to “transform” the way we live and work, downplaying the potential for negative impacts on society, while others warn of an existential threat to humanity.  Most perspectives land somewhere in between. We see AI, like other technological advances before it, as an exciting tool with tremendous potential. As such, it is not inherently helpful or harmful: its impacts depend on how it is used. Now is the perfect time for the thoughtful and extensive integration of social science evidence and expertise into AI development, deployment, implementation, and use so that AI can be optimally, positively effective while minimizing risks of harm to society.

AI has existed in various forms for decades and until recently, was developed under tightly constrained parameters to do specific tasks. However, the 2022 launch of easy-to-access Large Language Model (LLM) tools such as ChatGPT, which input massive amounts of data and generate responses to questions in conversational language, had leaders across many sectors – from education to business – scrambling to set guidelines and parameters for AI’s use in their domains. Indeed, AI and other technologies are not typically implemented in isolation but in systems. Social science approaches can help us understand and address these technologies’ reach, implications, and impact within these “AI systems.”

We know that social and behavioral science (SBS) has a hold on the conversation when institutional and government decision-makers parley over what goes into ‘policy.’ But oftentimes the SBS researchers whose own work goes into policy are unaware that they’re making an impact in the real world and are stymied from amplifying their findings or using them to advance their careers or fields.

With this in mind, Sage partnered with Overton to create Sage Policy Profiles, a free-to-use tool that enables researchers to discover the real-world impact – drawing from a pool of more than 10 million policy documents – of their work on policy, visualize, export, and share what they find.

In light of this launch, I sat down with Euan Adie, founder of Altmetric and Overton and currently Overton’s managing director, to learn more about the outsized impact that SBS makes on policy and his work creating tools to connect the scholarly and policy worlds.

There is a growing recognition in the scientific community that health research is richer when it incorporates the perspectives of those with lived experience.

What is lived experience? It is the unique expertise provided by individuals who have been directly affected by specific health issues. It could come from a patient or their caregiver, or from members of a community who have experienced something collectively, such as adverse health effects from contaminated drinking water. Those with lived experience hold powerful insights that can help improve health systems, research, and policy.

For those reading nearly any media outlet during 2023, it is hard to miss the fact that Artificial Intelligence (AI)–in all its varied manifestations–is a regularized component of public discussion and debate. The celebrated and feared emergence of ChatGPT in late 2022, the Writers Guild of America strike and the concerns that writing would cease to be a human endeavor, and the recent firing and subsequent rehiring of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman clearly illustrate that AI is having a moment. So much so that prediction and forecasting site Metaculus is tracking to see if Time's person of the year for 2023 will be AI. Honestly, it is hard to argue against this idea. But before we get too far down a path of contending and arguing that an AI revolution will fundamentally transform the world in which we live, perhaps we should consider what social science can tell us and has told us about the longitudinal impacts of technological change on society. The interdisciplinary world of Science & Technology Studies can provide a window into how new and emerging technologies impact how we live on the planet.

Science & Technology Studies as a field of inquiry that emerged in the middle of the twentieth century, bringing together those interested and invested in better understanding the ways science and technology impacted society. Situated within broader discussions about science "and" society, and science "for" society, early work–exemplified by Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions–aimed to reveal the deep social roots of scientific discovery and technological innovation.

Universities have the resources to help combat the climate crisis. What’s more, they have a responsibility to their students – who want to take action, but may lack the support they need to do so.

One way universities can do this is to help students use their skills to contribute to university- and community-wide projects. This can create real change, as well as teaching students how to take collaborative action.

In 2019, we started a research project with colleagues at York St John University to find out what students felt about the climate crisis. To begin, we held focus groups with 23 students who had responded to a call for participation posted on social media and around the campus.

Read the full article on The Conversation.

Every 2 years, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) within the National Science Foundation (NSF) publishes a congressionally mandated report on the demographic makeup of the population working in and studying science and engineering (S&E). For decades, the employment section of this report largely focused on those working in S&E occupations, which generally require at least a 4-year degree. However, a thriving economy is served by a wide array of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) jobs that may not require a bachelor’s degree—from electricians to technicians to construction workers. Historically, these professions were not included in NCSES analyses, leaving a notable gap in our understanding of the STEM enterprise.