Irrational Economist_ Making Decisions in a Dangerous World - Erwann Michel-Kerjan [131]
ARE ACADEMIC SOCIAL SCIENTISTS MAKING A DIFFERENCE?
In a sense we would like to continue the discussion that Baruch Fischhoff and Ralph Keeney opened in their chapters. Studies of the policy process frequently conclude that social scientists have had significant impact on policy. Broadly over time, in many areas, one can trace drastic policy changes to their scientific origins even in domains of social relations that would not seem amenable to the influence of scientific knowledge.
One example concerns attitudes and policies toward race in America. When the science changed, elite opinion changed, followed by mass opinion. Then, over time, policy changed as well. As late as the early 1920s, the consensus among scientists supported theories of racial superiority. By the late 1920s, however, scientists began to question biological theories of racial superiority so that by the 1950s a consensus among social scientists had emerged that white supremacists suffered from mental disorders or educational deficiencies. The elite media changed to match the scientific consensus, followed by mass opinion. Congress would never have enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 if the scientific discourse on race had remained in its 1920s mode of racial superiority.
Another example is the domain of sexual orientation. In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Changes in media discourse, public opinion, and public policy followed. The drastic departure from viewing homosexuality as a disease probably began with the research of Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s. Kinsey’s finding that almost half of the adult male population had experienced at least one homosexual encounter implicitly called into question the consensus view that all homosexuals were psychopathic. What changed the scientific consensus, however, was the seminal research of Evelyn Hooker at the University of California at Los Angeles in the 1950s. Using conventional psychological tests, Hooker compared a sample of gay men with a matched sample of straight men. She found no significant differences in personal adjustment and other psychometric measures. When Hooker and others replicated this research, they consistently found few differences. Over time, this new consensus made its way into elite and media discourses. Public opinion changed and new policies emerged.
These two examples of social science leading to policy changes involve mass publics and issues that, for many, engender strong emotions and opinions. Scientific research, however, frequently influences decisions in policy domains that are less emotional. Almost all popular models of policy formation and change find that, most of the time, policy change is slight and incremental, because the distribution and relative power of interest groups are stable. In other words, policy changes only slightly because interest group realities also change only slightly. But new scientific knowledge can produce policy change even during stable political periods. The policy models point to scientific findings as one frequent source of policy change. Often through the work of scientists informing legislative staff and agency administrators, major policy changes can happen with little public arousal.
An example of a major policy change that emerged from scientific findings is passage of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) of 1976, which established national cradle-to-grave requirements for the management and disposal of hazardous and toxic wastes. At the time, there was no public clamor for action. (The well-publicized Love Canal waste exposure event occurred in 1978 and the Superfund clean-up law was passed in 1980, after RCRA had passed.) Why, then, did Congress pass legislation that, although