A Conversation with Nicholas A. Christakis [8.21.12]
This new frontier in the social sciences is being abetted and even accelerated by three things that are happening. The first is that a biological hurricane is approaching the social sciences. Discoveries in biology are calling into question all kinds of ideas, historically important ideas, in the social sciences—everything from the origin of free will, to collective expression and collective behavior, to the deep origins of basic human behaviors. All of these things are being challenged and elevated by discoveries in biology.
The second thing that is going to change, or challenge the social sciences, is the era of computational social science, or "big data." If you had asked social scientists even 20 years ago what powers they dreamed of having, they would have said, "It would be unbelievable if we could have this little tiny Black Hawk helicopter that could be microscopic, fly on top of you, and monitor where you are and who you're talking to, what you're buying, what you're thinking, and if it could do this in real time, all the time, for millions of people, all at the same time. If we could collect all these data, that would be amazing."Of course, that's exactly what we have now. We have, in everyone's pocket, a little device that functionally does all of the foregoing. We can pool these data, and we can understand human behavior. For me, one of the most interesting aspects of human behavior is collective expression. Not just individual-level behavior, but how do humans aggregate to form collective entities, whether they are thought of as a super-organism, or thought of as communities or groups or networks or nation-states? How do human beings find a collective expression? And we can use all these data to begin to understand human behavior and collective human behavior in a completely new way.
The third thing that's happening that is going to radically reshape the social sciences—and it intersects with the foregoing two ideas, the biological hurricane and big data, or computational social science—is a newfound appreciation for experimentation in the social sciences. There was always a tradition of doing bona fide experiments in the social sciences, going back well over 100 years, where people would be randomly assigned to different treatments. Psychologists have always been doing this, of course, but other branches of the social sciences are increasingly rediscovering, and more broadly applying, experiments in all kinds of settings: workplaces, schools, hospitals, the developing world, online. People are doing experiments all the time right now, and these experiments offer a robustness of causal inference that is phenomenal.
These three things: the biological hurricane, computational social science, and the rediscovery of experimentation, are going to change the social sciences in the 21st century. With that change will come, in my judgment, a variety of discoveries and opportunities that offer tremendous prospect for improving the human condition.
......When you do science, you need data, you need analytic ability, you need ideas. All of these things are required. I don't think it's appropriate to somehow say that data is just a commodity and it should just be given away. Part of the intellectual contribution and the step forward is figuring out how to get the data. So long as you describe what you did, and you describe how you got the data and what kind of data you have, in principle, other scientists could do the same thing.
In my particular lab, generally speaking, we widely share data. For instance, our Framingham Heart Study social network dataset was posted online; it's subject to certain restrictions that NIH imposed, but people can get that data. We've made publicly available many, many data sets, and we've also benefited from the kindness of others. We've gotten access to data from commercial firms, from other labs. There's a kind of widespread—actually cooperative, collaborative—system in place. At least in my judgment, so far, it's working.
In the series of the new science, worth reading!
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