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> Government officials, nonprofits, journalists and others seeking to make people care about the issue So their goal is to manipulate public opinion more effec
by nverno 5y ago
> Government officials, nonprofits, journalists and others seeking to make people care about the issue
So their goal is to manipulate public opinion more effectively. This approach is backfiring, causing more and more people to lose faith in social science in general.
The focus should be on enlightening, not convincing. If real personal stories don't lead readers to the same conclusions, perhaps the premise is incorrect. People are smart enough to see through over simplified explanations.
- notsureaboutpg 5y agoThis faith is already lost. If you talk to the average person in the US, they definitely feel (and rightly so) that social sciences are more about trying to convince people to accept specific ideologies rather than elucidate truths about humanity. A great example is the "gay gene" studies which found that there is no gay gene and that genetics alone (even a variety of genes vs a single gene) do not account for which people experience homosexuality and which do not. But that truth is politically problematic, so the study's authors cooperated with GLAAD to create messaging around the study's results that would be better for the affected communities politically, even if the truth of the results needed to be downplayed. And that's a hard science study, not even a social science study!