Because Reimagining Science Requires Behavioral and Social Scientists at the Table, Too

July 31, 2025 by Wendy Naus

Nearly 40% of deaths in the United States are preventable through changes in behavior. Modifiable risk factors like smoking, poor diet, inactivity, or alcohol use are contributors to many cancers. For children and teens ages 1 to 17, the leading cause of death is not disease…it’s gun violence. These are not problems with strictly biomedical solutions. They are deeply embedded in how people live, what they believe, and the environments they navigate every day. This is where behavioral and social science research (BSSR) provides answers. BSSR can examine individual characteristics and the broader contexts that shape health, or our “social determinants of health,” which either promote good health or exacerbate health disparities. Despite its enormous potential to improve lives, BSSR receives only a fraction of the funding and recognition given to biomedical research. In some cases, the use of terminology or phrases related to research on health disparities in a grant proposal have resulted in unfair termination of funding. If we want to understand not only today’s most pressing public health crises, but also the political moment science now finds itself in, we need scientists who ask the why’s and the how’s.

That belief is core to the work we do at Science for Good. As a co-founder of Science for Good, I aim to bridge the gap between public health and traditional science, ensuring that research extends beyond academia to benefit the communities it serves directly. I am committed to breaking down barriers and rebuilding trust by making scientific findings more understandable and actionable for those who need them most. I strive to reinforce that social and behavioral researchers are scientists too, and that our work serves a critical role in understanding, preventing, and addressing complex public health challenges.

Because Controlling the COVID-19 Pandemic Depends on Vaccine Uptake

January 26, 2021 by Wendy Naus

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused extraordinary devastation, claiming millions of lives and disrupting the economy and daily life across the globe. From the beginning, the course of the pandemic has depended on behavior – for example, whether people would engage in recommended public health actions like mask wearing and social distancing. Currently, the success of vaccination also hinges on behavior. While the successful development of vaccines is an incredibly important scientific breakthrough and their distribution and accessibility is critical, ultimately, the public’s willingness to get vaccinated will determine whether we bring this pandemic under control. Insights from the social and behavioral sciences can help ensure that efforts to encourage vaccination and address hesitancy succeed.

The Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Coordinating Committee at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), wanted to assist the public health community’s communication efforts to foster confidence in COVID-19 vaccines. To identify evidence-informed strategies for communicating about COVID-19 vaccines, we formed a trans-NIH working group consisting of behavioral and social science specialists across the NIH. On November 5th, 2020, the trans-NIH working group convened a multidisciplinary expert panel featuring 15 leading experts in public health and social science (e.g., communication, psychology, behavioral economics, health disparities, and anthropology). The expert panel was charged with identifying effective approaches for communicating about COVID-19 vaccines and suggesting ways these approaches could be tailored, targeted, and delivered to address the unique needs of diverse populations. The expert panel discussion formed the basis for recommendations about how government entities, such as U.S. federal agencies and partners at the state and local levels, could most effectively communicate vaccine-related information to a variety of constituents.

Because We’re Living Through an “Infodemic”

September 22, 2020 by Wendy Naus

In February 2020, about a month before COVID-19 became an inescapable reality around the world, the World Health Organization issued a warning about another, related danger: an “infodemic.” As conspiracy theories about the origins of COVID-19, the severity of its threat, and possible treatments circulated on social media, WHO officials cautioned that spreading false and misleading claims would make the work of combating the virus and its spread that much more difficult. They urged Silicon Valley’s Big Tech companies—especially social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok—to remove or flag content about COVID-19 that wasn’t based on science. Many have done so in the months since. However, once disinformation starts spreading online, it quickly takes on a life of its own.

COVID-19 is just one of many recent crises that disinformation campaigners and other digital extremists have taken advantage of to sow chaos, destabilize the news media ecosystem, and mobilize individuals and groups to their causes. From presidential elections, to civil rights movements, to public health programs, extremists look for opportunities to spread inaccurate or outright manufactured information, manipulate media coverage, and further their own agendas. Increasingly, they rely on digital tools like social media, online forums, and “do-it-yourself” image, video, and audio production to accomplish their goals. Following the violence at Charlottesville, Virginia’s “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, UC Irvine’s Office of Inclusive Excellence launched “Confronting Extremism,” an initiative “dedicated to understanding the ideas and behaviors advocated far outside of alignment to the campus values for social justice and equity in today’s society.” As part of that initiative, we have developed a collection of six self-paced teaching modules titled “Confronting Digital Extremism” that we hope will not only raise awareness of extremists’ “digital toolkits,” but also inspire effective means of confronting extremism online.

Because Collective Behavior Change is the Only Way We Can Stop the Spread of COVID-19

August 25, 2020 by Wendy Naus

The idea that led us to write the book titled Together Apart: The Psychology of COVID-19 was a very simple one. We reasoned that while waiting for an effective vaccine or a medical treatment for COVID-19, all we can do to stop the spread of the virus is to change our behavior. And what is more, because of the contagious nature of COVID-19, it is not just “my” behavior, it is the behavior of all of “us”— of all the groups that we belong to, of all our communities, and of society at large —that needs to change so that we can effectively control the COVID-19 spread.

In that sense, it is clear that the challenge that the COVID-19 outbreak poses is both huge and rather unique. It is unique in that, up until now, as social scientists, we have mostly focused on ways in which we can change individuals’ health behaviors. For instance, when a smoker wants to quit smoking, it is them as an individual we target because it is the individual who has to stop smoking. Likewise, when an individual wants to improve their physical fitness, we have to consider ways in which we can motivate them as an individual to, for example, join a gym. Even though the social environment that such individuals find themselves in is of crucial importance to facilitate such behavior change, it is ultimately an individual choice whether they quit undesirable habits and improve their physical health.

Because We Will Need to Do Better in the Next Crisis

May 19, 2020 by Wendy Naus

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a surge of interest in the press and social media in comparisons with other countries. When did the new virus reach other countries, how did they handle it, and how well did they do? I have lost count of the number of times I have read that the first COVID-19 deaths happened in the United States and South Korea at about the same time in January 2020, but it seems clear that the Koreans got on top of the epidemic, at least the first wave, while the United States did not.

This interest should survive this pandemic and broaden to include all sources of poor health, disease and death. South Korea did not suddenly start to outperform the United States in health last January. This has been true for decades. Life expectancy at birth (a weighted average of death rates at all ages) is the best single metric for the health of a population. In 2004, Korea and the US had almost exactly the same life expectancy at birth, even though the US spent a much larger percentage of its (much larger) gross national product (GNP) on the health sector. By 2018, before the discovery of the novel coronavirus, the US had gained one full year of life expectancy. Life expectancy in Korea improved by five years during the same period. Looking across the developed countries, it becomes clear that Korea’s improvement was better than most countries, but the US is really the outlier. We were caught up to and passed in this fundamental measure of population health by dozens of countries, many of which are considerably poorer, and all of which spend much less that the US on health services and research (Portugal, Costa Rica, Slovenia, Chile—not to mention all other rich countries of Europe, Canada and Japan). We need to ask difficult questions about our performance in the COVID-19 pandemic, but also about the obesity epidemic, the opioid epidemic, heart disease, cancers, stroke, injuries and all other causes of death and disability.

Because It Requires Confronting the Assumptions We Have About Others

February 26, 2019 by Wendy Naus

Social science comes in many varieties, is comprehensive in scope, and applied to an infinite number of real-world challenges, questions, and problems society faces. At its core, it concerns the human condition. While an economist, criminologist, psychologist, or sociologist may emphasize different things about being human, and often use different methods, their research is about people. But the people who we seek some understandings about, or from, have lives apart from our research. In other words, their lives overlap with what we study but are also more complex than that. Their day-to-day living involves connections with others, a history, setting, and sociopolitical / economic context, all of which can change over time. Social science is messy this way.

The social science I conduct concerns understanding the use and consequences of illegal drugs and substance use disorder (SUD). As a medical and cultural anthropologist, my research has given me an up-close perspective on these topics and how people’s lives are affected by them. The recent opioid epidemic has significantly increased the public awareness and concern about drug addiction. It has mobilized long and much-needed healthcare resources to address this challenge, moving drug policy marginally away from the war on drugs. Starting my career in the 1990s, recent actions are welcomed, but bittersweet. Drug addiction has always needed more public health attention and only realizing this now as more people are dying is frustrating.

Because Social and Behavioral Research Improves Health and Quality of Life

September 26, 2017 by Wendy Naus

Medical research empowers the development of new interventions to prevent, diagnose and treat—even cure—disease, but it is not the only scientific discipline crucial to advancing health. By fostering a better understanding of human behavior, preferences, and motivations, social and behavioral research reveals new strategies for achieving optimal health outcomes. Social and behavioral research provides the real-world context needed to ensure the products of medical research—prescription drugs, medical devices, surgical procedures, and more—benefit patients efficiently and effectively. And social and behavioral research is nothing less than crucial to achieving more progress in prevention. Underinvesting in this research squanders countless opportunities to improve the health of our nation.

Social and behavioral research, supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and other federal agencies, as well as various foundations, enables us to understand patterns among groups and individuals to help address a wide range of medical and public health threats including seemingly intractable challenges such as injury and violence. For example, NIH and CDC have funded researchers at the University of Chicago to study the root causes of violent crime in Chicago, reviewing medical-examiner records of city homicides and finding that many violent confrontations begin over something minor, such as an insult. This information led them to explore interventions that could help people avoid costly decision-making mistakes in situations they commonly face. A cognitive behavioral program in Chicago helped teenage boys think before they act, dramatically reducing arrest rates among teens. Research like this is broadly supported by a majority of Americans (60%) who say there is value in better understanding and preventing injury and violence caused by preventable accidents, deliberate acts or neglect, according to a national public opinion survey commissioned by Research!America.

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