Social science is the scholarly study of human society and social relationships. It is a tremendously important branch of research that examines  what it means to be a social being, how individuals function together as organized groups and societies, and how they interact with each other on issues of common interest. Yet, this remains very broad to provide proper guidance to an early career researcher, as myself. In particular, a researcher en route to social impact. In order to be socially relevant, social research has to be problem-driven. I think, the most pressing problems of today are

(1) sustainability transition, incl. natural resource governance, climate change, and decoupling of well-being from consumption;

(2) intercultural conflicts, religious controversies, new sources of violence, and pathways to democracy, tolerance, equality, and peace;

(3) unbridled reliance on technology of digitalisation and automation/AI leading to individual deskilling, societal depoliticisation, new political economy of tech giants, and loss of social competences.

Yet, it does not mean that we can tackle these issues straight away. Indeed, over a century of institutionalized social research already provided us with some important insights, but as our environment changes, so do the answers.

Having asked myself this question – What are the most important questions in social science today? – I decided to search for what is being considered by the scholarly community as the most pressing questions that social scientists should tackle today, the unresolved issues that young scholars should work upon. And I found a few. I think that paying attention to the most urgent social science problems will equip us with tools to address these problems. We are free in choosing our cases, methods of analysis, and testing different theories, yet, we are indebted to the society (and tax-payers) to act at the edge of human knowledge and to be socially relevant keeping in mind the BIG picture.

Top ten social science questions

(Nature 470, 18-19 (2011) doi:10.1038/470018a):

1. How can we induce people to look after their health?

2. How do societies create effective and resilient institutions, such as governments?

3. How can humanity increase its collective wisdom?

4. How do we reduce the ‘skill gap’ between black and white people in America?

5. How can we aggregate information possessed by individuals to make the best decisions?

6. How can we understand the human capacity to create and articulate knowledge?

7. Why do so many female workers still earn less than male workers?

8. How and why does the ‘social’ become ‘biological’?

9. How can we be robust against ‘black swans’ — rare events that have extreme consequences?

10. Why do social processes, in particular civil violence, either persist over time or suddenly change?

During the symposium in Harvard that led to formulation of these problems, a few other concrete puzzles received a lot of attention, too (details from Nature):

11.  How physiological and psychological attributes, such as obesity and loneliness, can spread through a social network like a contagious disease?

12.  How to explain “small outbursts of creativity and achievement”: such Renaissance Florence, the Scottish Enlightenment, Silicon Valley?

13.  What are the sources of social inequality and how does it relate to political institutions and social structures?

14. We’re better at biology than behavior. Some of the social problems are ‘solved’ from the technical point of view.  How to foster behavioral change?

15. What is the causal effect of culture on human behavior and how can better models of what culture is and how it works be developed?

Here also 10 reasons why we need social sciences.