Because Nearly Every Challenge We Face Requires Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Human Behavior
This week, we’re highlighting the recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Value of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences to National Priorities. Produced at the request of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the report assesses the contributions of the social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) sciences to issues of national importance. Passages from the section “Why Support Research in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences?” are excerpted below. We encourage you to read the report in its entirety, which is available for free on the National Academies website.
Every month the Gallup Poll asks a representative sample of Americans “What do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?” The main problems identified include jobs, unemployment, the economy, health care, and race relations. Issues such as these have clear social, behavioral, and economic aspects that need to be better understood, and SBE research can contribute to understanding and addressing them. Moreover, many other problems that at first glance appear to be issues only of medicine or engineering or computer science have social and behavioral components, such as patients’ understanding of medical information and community responses to proposed highway development…
Consider, for example, the challenge of immunizing the population against infectious diseases, such as measles and influenza. Medical science has developed many effective vaccines, and when they are administered to the appropriate numbers of people they control the spread of the disease. Recent outbreaks of measles, such as those in California and Minneapolis, occurred because not enough parents had their children vaccinated for measles because they did not believe or did not accept the value of vaccination. These outbreaks show that individual beliefs and social influences can disrupt vaccination programs and place communities at risk. They also demonstrate that there is a role for SBE science in helping to understand the social and behavioral dynamics of vaccination decisions and using that understanding to develop more effective public health and public information strategies. That is, in addition to the biology of a disease, vaccination efforts require dealing with individuals’ and groups’ beliefs and decisions about vaccination.
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