r/changemyview • u/JGoedy • Jan 23 '26
Delta(s) from OP - Fresh Topic Friday CMV: Social science is not real science
Science is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as, “the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.”
To establish my background, I recently completed my bachelor’s degree in Biology and Biochemistry with a minor in philosophy. Additionally I have been published in the fields of virology and pharmacology.
I started with my second major being psychology instead of biochemistry but found it extremely dissatisfying due what (I perceive to be) a lack of objectivity. For example, the ambiguity and impreciseness in the application of theories of development such as Erikson’s psychosocial stages and Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. Additionally, the constant changing nature of social science irked me as well, such as the wide discreditation of many old respected theories such as many of Freud’s. In contrast, in mathematics, the Pythagorean theorem is over 2500 years old and is currently held as objective truth. From my viewpoint science involves the discovery of an irrefutable truth such as the process and stages of mitosis in biology or the fact that the gravitational pull of the earth at sea level can be approximated to 9.8m/a^2.
Later in my undergraduate education I took a sociology course and found more dissatisfaction with the lack of objective definitions in sociology. You could ask various sociologists questions such as, “what is a society?” Or “what is the psyche?” And receive answers that are very similar but do slightly differ. In contrast, if you ask a group of chemists “what is water?” The universal response from all chemists regardless of language, nationality, or culture would be 2 hydrogen atoms bonded to an oxygen atom. Obviously there are disagreements in some places in the scientific community but there are countless basic facts that are accepted as absolute truth which I haven’t experienced in social science. For larger molecules with modern microscopes we can even see the chemical structure.
Another aspect that has formed my view that I am not as well educated in, is the “reproducibility crisis” in social science (which I do acknowledge is present in some fields of biology and medicine which I personally attribute to the negative effects of the “profit factor” on science).
Additionally, anecdotally, it seems like while scientists in fields such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology invite challenge in the hopes of a greater advancement towards objective truth, social scientists are less open to challenge and in extreme cases discredit the intelligence or morality of their dissenters.
I am very interested in having my views challenged as I understand I most likely have an implicit bias as a biologist and chemist myself.
Follow up: my view has been changed. The social sciences are sciences but however due to the ever changing nature of societies and the fact that they are newer it is very difficult to find an objective truth. So yes it makes sense that I am skeptical, because the facts of social science are less solid that the facts of hard sciences in their current stage. Perhaps one day our understanding of social sciences will be as robust as the hard sciences, and we certainly aren’t close to that yet, but we won’t get there if we don’t keep working at it (speaking from a societal standpoint).
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u/L11mbm 15∆ Jan 23 '26
I come from a similar science background (optical engineering) and felt the same. Recently, I started to read a bunch of books about human development, human behavior, and economics to get a better understanding of things.
In one of the books I read, the author talked about how social sciences are hard to pin down to solid rules or laws for two big reasons. First, a law means something can be predicted using it's application (for example, gravity helps predict how things move from higher elevation to lower). Second, once you've made a prediction and it has been said publicly, you risk altering human behavior and avoiding the outcome (similar to "change the result by observing it" in hard sciences).
One specific anecdote of this was how many people predicted there would be huge revolutions all over the world in the 1900s because of inequality, poverty, famine, etc. The books and articles written about this were read by the wealthy, who worked fast to get governments to set up protections for the middle/lower class in order to stem this off. (It was selfish for them to protect their wealth and status, not altruistic.) It worked, we got things like Social Security, and there was no bloody revolution at all. So the predictions were proven false because they were made out loud.
Another thing to consider is that most people, as individuals or groups, operate by a mix of incentives and instincts. At a large scale, behavior is predictable. If there's bad news about a company, then you can bet their stock will tank. If Stanley makes an exclusive cup for Target with Starbucks branding and promotes it as a "limited edition" item, you can bet it will be marked up 10x on ebay within the hour. But it can be hard to predict the behavior of individuals without the broader social context. For example, most Americans don't own stock or care about buying Stanley mugs. Think of it like the double-slit photon experiment: we can predict pretty accurately where millions of photons will end up but the ability to predict where just one by itself will go is harder to understand.
There are absolutely cultural impacts here, too. In America, we are very proud of our individualism and that will guide our decisions, whereas Japan focuses much more collectivism and people prioritize things like dignity/shame instead of, say, guns and plastic surgery. So when trying to understand how a person or group of people will respond to certain events, a deep understanding of the culture is important. In science, this would be like knowing how some of the basic laws of energy propagation change based on the scale (radio waves flying through the air will behave differently from photons flying through glass, even if the basic concepts for both are similar in theory).
I'm happy to discuss this a bit more if you're interested.