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By Root 990 0

doing social science seems kind of implausible. As I discussed in Chapter 2, individual behavior is complicated by dozens of psychological biases, many of which operate outside of our conscious awareness and interact in as-yet-unknown ways. And as I discussed in Chapter 3, when individuals interact with one another, their collective behavior may simply not be derivable from their individual attributes and incentives, no matter how much you know about them. Given that the real complexity of the social world—involving not just people and groups, but also a bewildering array of markets, governments, firms, and other institutions that we have created for ourselves—is so much greater than I have even begun to describe here, why on earth would any one person even think that they could write down a set of rules that could explain it all?

My answer is that social theorists are people too, and so they make the same mistake that planners, politicians, marketers, and business strategists make, which is to dramatically underestimate the difficulty of what they are trying to do. And just like planners, politicians, and so on, no matter how many times such grand theories fail, there is always someone new who thinks that it can’t be that difficult—because, after all, “it’s not rocket science.” If much of what sociology has to offer seems like common sense, in other words, it is not just because everything about human behavior seems obvious once you know the answer. Part of the problem is also that social scientists, like everyone else, participate in social life and so feel as if they can understand why people do what they do simply by thinking about it. It is not surprising, therefore, that many social scientific explanations suffer from the same weaknesses—ex post facto assertions of rationality, representative individuals, special people, and correlation substituting for causation—that pervade our commonsense explanations as well.

MEASURING THE UNMEASURABLE

One response to this problem, as Lazarsfeld’s colleague Samuel Stouffer noted more than sixty years ago, is for sociologists to depend less on their common sense, not more, and instead try to cultivate uncommon sense.10 But getting away from commonsense reasoning in sociology is easier said than done. In large part the difficulty is that for most of the history of social science, it simply hasn’t been possible to measure the elements of social phenomena the way we measure the elements of physical and biological phenomena. Social phenomena, as I have already noted, consist of large populations of people interacting with and influencing one another as well as with the organizations and governments they create—none of which is easy to observe directly, let alone put in a lab.11

Recently, however, the world has begun to change in ways that may lift some of these historical limitations on social science. Communication technologies, like e-mail, cell phones, and instant messaging now implicitly trace out social networks among billions of individuals, along with the flow of information among them. Online communities such as Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and World of Warcraft facilitate interactions among people in ways that both promote new kinds of social activity and also record it. Crowdsourcing sites like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk are increasingly being used as “virtual labs” in which researchers can run psychological and behavioral experiments.12 And Web search, online media, and electronic commerce are generating ever-increasing insight into the intentions and actions of people everywhere. The capability to observe the actions and interactions of potentially billions of people presents some serious issues about the rights and privacy of individuals, and so we must proceed with caution.13 Nevertheless, these technologies also exhibit enormous scientific potential, allowing us for the first time in history to observe, in high fidelity, the real-time behavior of large groups, and even societies as a whole.

For example, the Music Lab experiments that I discussed in Chapter 3, which