… would include, of course, “social neuroscience, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology and social epigenetics.”
From New York Times:
So social scientists should devote a small palace guard to settled subjects and redeploy most of their forces to new fields like social neuroscience, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology and social epigenetics, most of which, not coincidentally, lie at the intersection of the natural and social sciences. Behavioral economics, for example, has used psychology to radically reshape classical economics. …
Good thing the job market is booming in consequence. 😉
It is time to create new social science departments that reflect the breadth and complexity of the problems we face as well as the novelty of 21st-century science. These would include departments of biosocial science, network science, neuroeconomics, behavioral genetics and computational social science. Eventually, these departments would themselves be dismantled or transmuted as science continues to advance.
And as scandals catch up with them.
Possibly the falsest thing that was widely said about all the recent scandals in social sciences, around cheating to achieve research results, was that “counterintuitive” findings were prized.
Absolutely not. What was prized were “edgy” findings that were intuitive in the sense that they conformed to what the social scientists themselves already believed: That everyone is really a racist and behaves irrationally. Which, of course justifies intervention in their lives. Which justifies new social sciences departments for which such claims are foundational. And in consequence of those claims, the practitioners will call themselves scientists.
The job market won’t be bad any more—for them.
See also: Most academic psychologists cut corners with data.