By Kenneth A. Bollen (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

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.

“...they remain our best and most reliable hope for understanding and solving many of the defining crises of our time.”

First, consider politicians. While lawmakers are positioned to fix government dysfunction, they operate under intense systemic pressures. Reelection is a primary incentive, which often runs counter to long-term planning and perspectives—especially when they clash with party orthodoxy or powerful lobbyists. While a social scientist’s career can be ruined by fabricated data, a politician's career is often sustained by “strategic messaging.”

Next, consider broader cultural influencers. We routinely see social media elites, movie stars, or sports icons offer policy advice based on personal anecdote. A celebrity, for instance, might use their individual experiences to prescribe fixes for national fertility declines. Similarly, religious leaders draw from theological doctrine to affect policy, while business titans filter societal problems through the lens of market profitability.

Beyond these cultural figures, imagine institutional networks like technocratic agencies, bureaucracies, and think-tanks operating entirely without scientific guardrails. Left on their own, these policy-planning networks would be guided by organizational self-preservation or donor demands. Without social and behavioral science theory coupled with rigorous data, their outputs would inevitably become tools for specific agendas rather than sources of disinterested facts.

We do not need to imagine this world, we already live with these intense pressures. Influencers, politicians, and various elite networks exert massive control over public policy. However, in our real world, social and behavioral scientists actively embed themselves within these institutional spaces. It is the rigorous, peer-reviewed framework of the social and behavioral sciences that provides the essential empirical anchor needed to keep these institutions grounded in reality.

Social and behavioral sciences are organized around the ideals of professional rigor, disciplined inquiry, careful analysis, and reproducible and replicable observation. Though imperfect in practice, they remain our best and most reliable hope for understanding and solving many of the defining crises of our time.

Kenneth A. Bollen is the Henry Rudolph Immerwahr Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Psychology & Neuroscience and Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a member of the L.L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory and a Fellow at the Carolina Population Center.

A leading expert in structural equation modeling (SEM), Bollen has authored four books and over 200 peer reviewed articles. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and has received the Psychometric Society’s Career Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Lazarsfeld Award for Distinguished Contributions to Sociological Methodology, and the Sells Lifetime Award for Distinguished Multivariate Research. He received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University (Sweden), and Woxsen University (India) established the Kenneth A. Bollen Chaired Professorship in Structural Equation Models in his honor. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association, and the Association for Psychological Science.

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