In his article, “Social science needs to get its act together,” Cameron Clarke claims social science/political psychology does not push its influences into government and other people with power, as well as other people tend to believe that they know much about how people work while realistically, they know very little. While I do not claim to be the most researched in social science literature, I would say with my background in social psychology, I feel I am more than qualified to respond to this article. Social sciences include sociology, social psychology and counseling, just to name a few, and have influenced many social changes over the past decades.

Although it may not be as obvious as a political party saying it has many psychologists and sociologists on their staff influencing their social policy decisions, social science has had major impacts on society.

One change social science has had on society is police are now trained to work against their internal prejudices in order to not discriminate. This program was started because of experiments in social science that revealed  people had the tendency to be more likely to shoot at a black male than white male. Social science has also made great strides researching the cause and effects of stalking, relationship formation and many other aspects of human interaction. Think of us as the Apple Store. If it’s a part of the human experience, we’ve got a research experiment for it.

Getting back to the points Clarke made: saying psychology does not take part in political issues, or if it does it is biased, is simply not true. Social psychology has a very rigorous peer evaluation process and only once something is a well-established theory or experiment with strong evidence to support it does it become published in an American Psychological Association journal. This may make many of you cringe, but social psychology is one of the driving forces behind movements like gun control and the gay rights campaign.  Clarke also said social science research has a chance to be biased, which is true for any scientific field. 

To avoid biased results, psychology has multiple “safety nets.” The peer evaluation of results and publications, re-creations of experiments and statistics to rule out chance occurrences. However, there’s a reason why this research took a long time to start having programs and laws enacted upon it. One reason is people often discount research from psychology due to people not understanding psychology uses the same scientific method as any other scientific field, whether it is engineering, physics or biology. 

Another reason is our political structure is not the best. Most of  Congress does not use social science advisors nor do they have scientific backgrounds, instead they are mostly lawyers or business people.

While sometime they do tend to go to academic sources such as the APA or consultants who have performed research in the area, government officials don’t tend to go to the right sources due to another issue: money.

I’m not suggesting politicians don’t have money, I’m suggesting money gives you a louder voice to be heard. In science, there are always arguments about various results in an experiment or people who refuse to listen to new evidence (see the Flat Earth Society) that would interfere with a world view. There are a few groups from the field of psychology who do just that; and unfortunately for much more credible researchers or organizations, such as the APA, they tend to have money and a platform. One of these groups would be the Family Research Council, a socially conservative group that are often given the chance to voice their opinions on local or national news when they have little to no data to support what they claim and instead just list biased opinions.

This has a negative effect on all the correct and accurate data that social science has found over the decades because they are not given an equal opportunity. While we would like to have a larger voice in government policies, when our voice is ignored by politicians and ruling parties who instead only listen to the groups who have a political platform and money, it becomes rather difficult.

One cannot simply say it is the researchers’ fault when the higher-ups don’t listen; it is a problem with the higher-ups. 

All the social scientists can do is continue to submit their results and hope that one day politicians and the world will take notice.

I agree with Clarke’s statement that many people assume they know about social science and how it works just because they go through social interactions every day. I believe this is important to discuss, as it is dangerous and foolish to assume we are experts in a topic, when in actuality, we know very little of the topic.