Behavioral and Social Science Research A National Resource, Part I (1982) / Chapter Skim
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3. Knowledge From the Behavioral and Social Sciences: Examples
3. Knowledge From the Behavioral and Social Sciences: Examples
Pages 33-62
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From page 33... ...
To illustrate the breadth and variety of basic research in the social and behavioral sciences, this chapter presents a set of vignettes briefly describing developments in a few areas of research. The vast range and variety of research in the behavioral and social sciences makes a comprehensive survey of such efforts impossible in a report of this kind.
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From page 34... ...
Is the study of human origins a biological or a social science? Its methods are now largely drawn from the physical and biochemical sciences, while its explanations of human evolution depend heavily on ideas about the nature of social interaction.
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From page 35... ...
Early research by Lazarsfeld and his colleagues (1944) revealed that actual voting behavior runs counter to widely held beliefs about how voters decide among candidates particularly to the notion that the typical voter makes a rational decision based on careful consideration of the candidates' records and stated positions on issues.
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From page 36... ...
The last definitively critical election period was that of the 1932-1934 presidential and congressional elections; it is still too early to decide whether the 1980 presidential election signaled a new realignment. The Michigan studies and others also led to the solution of a number of other puzzles regarding voting behavior.
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From page 37... ...
. 37 HISTORY OF THE FAMILY As the result of efforts by social scientists in many disciplines who have vigorously explored data from numerous sources with the aid of multivariate statistical procedures, it is now possible to describe modern family life with a fair integration of the particulars of internal family practices, ethnic, class, and national cultural settings, and the location of these styles of life within vast historical and world trends.
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From page 38... ...
Clearly there was a latitude to family decision making about marriage, births, and employment that far exceeded the Malthusian cycles of food and famine or the later model of demographic transition from premodern culture to urban industrialized culture. The desire to improve the quality of family and demographic history gained urgency after World War II, when populations of non-European nations exploded and the question arose as to whether the European experience with the flourishing of the small nuclear family would repeat itself throughout the modern world.
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From page 39... ...
No overarching theoretical synthesis has yet resulted. Social scientists cannot yet link in any causal statement all the important variables of family life, which range from courtship practices and child care to industrialization and urbanization.
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From page 40... ...
health-impairing habits and lifestyles, such as smoking, heavy drinking, lack of exercise, poor diet, and poor hygienic practices; and (3) reactions to illness, including minimization of the significance of symptoms, delay in seeking medical care, and failure to comply with treatment and rehabilitation regimens.
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From page 41... ...
A follow-up study after eight and a half years showed that subjects exhibiting type A behavior at the study's inception were about twice as likely as type B individuals to develop coronary heart disease. This differential in risk persisted when statistical procedures were used to control for the influence of other risk factors, such as cigarette smoking, serum cholesterol, and high blood pressure.
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From page 42... ...
A physiologically mediated craving for cigarettes thus depends directly on the smoker's psychological state, explaining why smokers tend to light up a cigarette when they are nervous. REACTIONS TO ILLNESS AND THE SICK ROLE A third process through which behavior leads to physical illness is the practice of some individuals of minimizing the significance of symptoms, delaying in seeking medical care, or failing to comply with treatment and rehabilitation regimens.
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From page 43... ...
There no doubt has been a shift in the character of modern life, epitomized in such phrases as "mass society" and "the eclipse of community." Yet, to paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of the death of the primary group have proved greatly exaggerated. Social scientists working in different corners of society have repeatedly confirmed the hardiness and tenacity of the primary group, often in unlikely places.
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From page 44... ...
THE ANALYSIS OF STATUS ATTAINMENT The study of social stratification the unequal distribution of power, privilege, and prestige in society and social mobility the stability and change in these attributes from generation to generation and during the life coursewas radically transformed with the publication in 1967 of Blau and Duncan's The American Occupational Structure. Prior to the work of Duncan and his
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From page 45... ...
Moreover, borrowing statistical procedures developed by the geneticist Sewall Wright (and independently by several econometricians) , Blau and Duncan were able to represent and quantify complex processes of status attainment through what are called path models and corresponding systems of structural equations.
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From page 46... ...
Consider the role of education in social mobility. A good deal of both sociological and popular writing in the 1960s portrayed American society as one in which individuals largely inherit their status from their parents and in which the educational system serves mainly as an instrument of status transmission rather than as a means of freeing people from their social origins.
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From page 47... ...
Much of the power of the modeling procedure used in the study of status attainment path analysis and structural equation models-derives from its requirement for precise specification of the hypothesized model and its capacity to provide statistical estimates of the adequacy of the model. These requirements make it much easier to understand and to criticize the work of others, even that in other disciplines (e.g., economics)
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From page 48... ...
An underlying assumption of the information processing approach is that the programs of thought consist of a set of elementary mental operations. Since many of these mental operations are not available to consciousness, the empirical analysis has been an important branch of the field and a major
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From page 49... ...
. While the information processing approach has been productive in linking human cognition to artificial intelligence through the concept of mental programs, it also provides creative opportunities to link cognition to the brain's underlying neural structure.
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The information processing approach has already led to enhanced understanding of the complex mental performance involved in creativity, memory, language, and the acquisition of other skills (Newell and Simon, 1972; Anderson, 19801. It has also provided a framework that shows promise of guiding explorations in the neural substrate, the functioning of the brain as an information processing system, which has to date proved nearly intractable.
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From page 51... ...
In a fundamental alteration of viewpoint, archaeologists directed attention away from the study of individual archaeological relics and their stylistic associations and toward the contextual reconstruction of broadly changing patterns of subsistence, technology, and social organization, which lay at the core of the introduction of agriculture. This alteration of viewpoint was facilitated by the favorable opportunities for interdisciplinary work existing in universities and by the support consistently given to such studies by the National Science Foundation.
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From page 52... ...
The adoption of food production as an alternative to hunting and gathering is now known to have begun independently in the Old and New Worlds not long after the Pleistocene or Ice Age drew to a close about 12,000 years ago. It appears to have occurred repeatedly and more or less independently in many different settings in both hemispheres, based on locally differentiated complexes of potentially domesticable food resources.
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From page 53... ...
Domesticated animals were of minor importance in most New World areas until the coming of the Spaniards in the 16th century. Most social scientists today have grown increasingly dubious about the adequacy of simple, single-cause explanations for anything, and the archaeologists among them are no exception.
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From page 54... ...
This question has occupied philosophers since antiquity and is the principal subject matter of two areas of contemporary social science welfare economics and axiomatic social choice theory. In economics the issue is to analyze economic arrangements in terms of their relative benefit to the totality of people in society; in political science the main interest is to analyze different voting systems, ranging from committee decision-making processes to national elections, to understand how individual preferences are translated into a collective or social choice.
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From page 55... ...
Knowledge from the Behavioral and Social Sciences Reagan Anderson Reagan Carter Anderson Carter Carter Reagan Anderson .
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in Part II.) One major contribution of social choice theory thus far has been to challenge older understandings derived from
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From page 57... ...
? These important questions turn out to be logically identical to the social choice calculus of Arrow, Vickery, and other social scientists.
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From page 58... ...
58 BEHAVIORAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH: PART I ~ o ~ O ~a' ~ \ 5-8 million years: /~2 / \10-16 million years \/ \ / 20-25 million years \,/ 35 million years FIGURE 3 Diagram of human evolution. The numbers refer to the evolutionary distance between chimpanzees and human beings.
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From page 59... ...
This is a major clarification almost no scientists believed that apes and humans are as close as they have proved to be. The fossil record of the early stages of hominid and nonhominid primate evolution is growing steadily.
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From page 60... ...
SOCIAL BEHAVIOR OF MONKEYS AND APES Despite centuries of fascination with monkeys and apes, reflecting intuitive recognition of their close relationship to humans, until very recently almost nothing was known about the behavior of nonhuman primates in their natural habitats. In the late 1950s a series of field studies was initiated by zoologists, psychologists, and anthropologists motivated by concerns ranging from an
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From page 61... ...
The study of nonhuman primate behavior falls into four interrelated areas: social behavior and development, social organization, ecology and life history patterns, and intelligence. Some examples illustrate the sorts of problems that primatologists address.
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From page 62... ...
Because the diets, digestive physiology, social organization, and life history patterns of many nonhuman primates are similar to our own, they provide ideal subjects for studying the effects of a changed environment on behaviors associated with survival and reproduction. The earliest research on nonhuman primates in captivity focused on ape intelligence, and recently primatologists have returned to this subject.
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