This project organizes a one-day interdisciplinary workshop, to be held at NSF and attended by approximately ten faculty members from around the United States. The purpose of the workshop is to specify concretely how and where research on genetics, cognition, and social behavior will generate transformative scientific practices, scholarly infrastructure, and widely relevant findings of high social value. The workshop will devote special attention to scientific endeavors whose implications speak directly to the Political Science program's areas of interest.
Since many scholars, institutions, and foundations are considering or deciding on investments in research on the genetic and cognitive bases of social behavior, a workshop that evaluates such investments is particularly valuable. Workshop participants will be invited to evaluate the contributions to date of such research in their field so as to clarify the kinds of "next steps" in the near term (i.e., five to ten years) that are likely to provide high-value outcomes. By focusing on the near term and meeting to engage in collective deliberation, participants will clarify new paths from present activities to feasible, concrete outcomes for transformative research at the intersection of genetics, cognition, and social behavior.
The study of preference formation offers one illustration of the ways that new interactions among specialists in the genetic, cognitive, and social behavioral domains could strengthen research. Why do individuals want what they want? As translated to the political world, this question concerns, among other things, citizens' preferences for government spending in a range of policy areas, views of the proper balance between local and national governmental authority, and overarching ideologies. To the extent that individuals' preferences have particular genetic correlates, can we use that information to guide the search for conditions under which particular cognitive operations can, and cannot, lead to changed preferences? A better understanding of the conditional relationships between genetic and cognitive phenomena may clarify, in turn, whether and how ongoing contextual changes such as those induced by technological advances might affect individuals' preferences.
Social behavioral research improves the quality of life for millions of people. It influences and makes more efficient actions ranging from the treatment of individual ailments to the development complex human institutions. As this research evolves, it is apparent that a greater understanding of social behavior can come from inquiries that integrate leading-edge social science with practices and content from research on genes and brain cells. Our ability to address many critical social challenges can be transformed by greater knowledge of social behavior’s biological foundations. At present, few biologists are aware of best practices and relevant concepts in social behavioral research. Moreover, few social scientists have more than a passing familiarity with biological concepts and practices. As a result, the existing knowledge base of how to conduct biologically-informed social behavioral research is minimal. Such tendencies will not quickly self-correct. Career pressures dissuade younger scholars from interdisciplinary research and data is scarce. While there are interesting social behavioral datasets and innovative data being collected on genes and cognition, there are relatively few datasets where both kinds of data are collected simultaneously. Hence, even basic biologically-informed social behavioral hypotheses are often impossible to evaluate scientifically. This grant funded a workshop and report whose main objective was to specify how fundable research on genetics, cognition and social behavior will generate transformative scientific practices, scholarly infrastructure, and widely relevant findings of high social value. The report pays particular attention to relative investment returns. The key question is not whether new investments in research on genes, cognition, and social behavior can generate positive scientific and social impacts, but whether the likely returns on these investments are greater or less than those that could be earned were individual scholars, research institutions, and the federal government to invest their funds elsewhere. This report concludes that there exist exciting opportunities to support transformative biologically-informed social science research. While this conclusion has a positive-valence, it makes no attempt to sugar-coat inherent challenges. Chief amongst these challenges is an appetite amongst some in the media and the public for dramatic claims about genetic determinants of behaviors. This appetite can skew researcher incentives away from credible research agendas and fuel public misunderstanding of genetics, cognition, and science in general. This report proceeds with such challenges in mind. A first conclusion is that a transformative and effective biologically-informed social behavioral research community cannot exist without clusters of researchers who have knowledge of both biological and social scientific research. The report evaluates educational programs that would expand the number of social scientists who have expertise in relevant biological areas. While it also discusses providing social science training to natural scientists, we believe that there will be greater demand for, and value added from, such training from social scientists, Data availability is another point of emphasis. There are very few data sets upon which a credible and broadly-effective biologically-informed social science can now be built. We concluded that exploring the social behavior of participants in existing health studies (by adding a questionnaire) would be most effective and efficient -- compared to genotyping respondents in extant social science databases or creating entirely new datasets. Greater emphasis on animal studies would also generate high investment returns. For example, social and natural scientists can work together to identify common genomic and/or neural substrates for social behavior across species. Given the minimal existing overlap between social behavioral, genetic, and cognitive research traditions, a necessary step in developing a credible, legitimate, and effective biologically-informed social behavioral research community is to provide opportunities for sustained interaction amongst social and natural scientists. Lack of a common language and the absence of social networks amongst social and natural scientists is an impediment to the development of biologically-informed social behavioral research. Such endeavors can take many forms: post-docs, multi-year training arrangements, or calls for problem-oriented grant proposals that would require detailed and credible plans for teamwork amongst social and natural scientists. In sum, there exist exciting opportunities to support transformative biologically-informed social science research. While many people offer opinions about the causes of human social behavior, it is critical that scientific inquiries into such matters be supported. Societies that have the ability to confront important social hypotheses with credible evidence and rigorous evaluative procedures gain the ability to develop and maintain increasingly complex social institutions. Compared to societies where such inquiries are not permitted or supported, societies that commit to rigorous evaluation of critical hypotheses are better able to defend themselves against many threats and can provide their citizens with opportunities to participate in, and benefit from, many valuable forms of social coordination. The effective and efficient functioning of numerous aspects of modern social infrastructure depends on the insights that science can offer. It is with such goals in mind that we present this report to you.
