THE CRISIS OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

by

Jon Elster

I am very pleased to be honored by this reward. Through my interaction with

colleagues, friends, and students, I have a long-standing attachment to Argentine

social science. I am particularly pleased to look back at my collaboration with

Carlos Nino, whose premature death was a great blow to your country and to the

academic community. Later, I have collaborated very profitably with, among

others, Carlos Acuna, Roberto Gargarello, Gabriel Negretto, and Julia Maskivker.

Most recently, Dean Spector and I have done some joint detective work in tracing

the origins of some currently fashionable ideas in social choice theory back to

early twentieth century Italy and early nineteenth century France. Although I have

not visited Argentina for scholarly purposes for more than twenty years, I am

confident that it will not be another twenty years before my next visit!

Let me now turn to my discours de réception.

I believe that the social sciences are in a profound state of crisis. The word I

shall use to describe the nature of his crisis is obscurantism. I shall also distinguish

between hard and soft obscurantism. The second is probably the most familiar.

There are perhaps five main branches of soft obscurantism: Marxism,

psychoanalysis, functionalism, the various forms of “French theory”, and most

recently the post-colonial and subaltern theories coming out of the Indian

subcontinent. They have in common the lack of respect for standards of argument

and evidence. They have nothing in common with what has traditionally been

thought of as science. In many countries, these paradigms dominate large parts of

anthropology, psychology, sociology and political science.

Many scholars will accept this rough description of a sad state of affairs.

They will add, however, that the discipline of economics provides an outstanding

instance of a genuinely scientific approach to social phenomena. I shall contest

this claim. In my opinion, economics as well as its offshoots in political science

offer many examples of hard obscurantism. While the arguments are coherent and

compelling, because of their mathematical form, their relevance for understanding

social phenomena is often close to nil. Forty years ago, my compatriot Ragnar

Frisch, one of the first winners of the Nobel prize in economics, wrote that

“econometrics must have relevance to concrete realities—otherwise it degenerates

into something which is not worthy of the name econometrics, but ought rather to

be called playometrics”. The importance of playometrics, and of science-fiction

economics more generally, has steadily increased since that time. Up to a certain

point, I am not against playfulness – but not if it also claims to be science!

Soft obscurantists tend to criticize hard obscurantists, and vice versa. When I

criticize both sides, each of them may easily assume that I belong to the other side.

Alternatively, each side may take me for an ally in their fight against the other

side. Neither situation is particularly pleasant. Fortunately, I am not alone in this

enterprise. A number of public-spirited scholars have taken time off from their

own work to criticize and denounce obscurantism in detail, sentence by sentence

or equation by equation.

In this talk I shall try to do three things.

First, I want to document and illustrate the pervasiveness of obscurantism in

the social sciences. This will take up the greatest part of the talk. It goes without

saying that in the span of one hour, I cannot go deeply into the theories I shall

discuss and denounce. Yet I believe that with one exception, to which I shall

return, I could back up my statements with detailed and specific criticism.

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Second, I shall speculate briefly on the causes of obscurantism. They are, I

believe, psychological, sociological, and institutional. Sadly, one of the

mechanisms that have been put in place to ensure quality of scientific work,

citation counts, may in fact serve to entrench obscurantism.

Third, I shall discuss how one can do non-obscurantist social science. I have

no simple recipe, but I believe that history and psychology will be the key

disciplines. Formal quantitative methods certainly have a place, but only when

they are sufficiently simple and robust to cast a light on social reality.

Obscurantism, as I see it, is not only a problem for the social sciences. It is

also a problem for society. To put it differently, obscurantism may cause harm as

well as waste. To the extent that it causes scholars and students to devote time and

other resources to expounding and studying worthless theories, the only effect is

waste. To the extent that obscurantist theories are used as premises for action, they

can cause severe harm. Hence we get four categories:

HARD OBSCURANTISM SOFT OBSCURANTISM

Long-term Capital Management Theories of autism (Bettelheim)HARM Current financial crisis Theories of memory repression

Statistical arguments for death Marxism (Marx) penalty and against handgun controls

Science-fiction economics Multiculturalism (Iris Young)WASTE Science-fiction political science Post-modernism (Latour)

Many regression analyses Structuralism (Lévi-Strauss) Subaltern theory (Homi Bhabha)

Functionalism (Bourdieu, Foucault) Psychoanalysis (Lacan, Klein)

Marxism (Badiou)

I cannot illustrate or discuss all of these, so I have to limit myself to some

examples.

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I begin with the bottom right-hand corner. Lévi-Strauss’s early work on kinship

systems, although deeply flawed empirically, was not obscurantist. His later work on

analysis of myth seems to me, however, impenetrable and lacking in intersubjective

validity. It is closer to numerology or astrology than to science. In France and

elsewhere, it was nevertheless deeply influential, by holding out the prospect of

creating the sociological analogue to Mendeleff’s periodic table of the elements. Since

the heyday of structuralism is over, and the theory seems to have left few traces, I shall

not discuss it any further.

Functionalism, however, is well and alive, as I discovered upon my recent return

to France. While functionalism as a mode of analysis was born in sociology and

anthropology, it is I believe, a very general attitude, rooted, I believe, in our desire to

find meaning in the world. To give a flavor of the approach, I can cite the claim that

the function of feuds and vendettas is to keep population size at a sustainable level.

While this may perhaps be an effect of feuding, the term “function” implies that feuds

can be explained by that effect. But this is getting thing backwards: science explains

phenomena by their causes, not by their effects.

The functionalist ideas of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu retain an immense

and immensely pernicious influence on French social science. According to these

writers, social practices of the most varied kind can be explained by their tendency to

maintain the hegemony of dominant groups. If some practices appear to have a

different effect, that fact is itself explicable by the “need of the system” to maintain a

facade of impartiality. This functionalist mind-set is readily identified by the pervasive

use of verbs (or verbal nouns) without subjects, as in the statements I have italicized in

the following excerpt from Foucault’s enormously influential Discipline and Punish:

But perhaps one should reverse the problem and ask oneself what is served by the

failure of the prison: what is the use of these different phenomena that are

continually being criticized; the maintenance of delinquency, the encouragement

of recidivism, the transformation of the occasional offender into a habitual

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delinquent, the organization of a closed milieu of delinquency Perhaps one should

look for what is hidden beneath the apparent cynicism of the penal institution,

which, after purging the convicts by means of their sentence, continues to follow

them by a whole series of 'brandings' (a surveillance that was once de jure and

which is today de facto; the police record that has taken the place of the convict's

passport) and which thus pursues as a 'delinquent' someone who has acquitted

himself of his punishment as an offender? Can we not see here a consequence

rather than a contradiction? If so, one would be forced to suppose that the prison,

and no doubt punishment in general, is not intended to eliminate offences, but

rather to distinguish them, to distribute them, to use them; that it is not so much

that they render docile those who are liable to transgress the law, but that they

tend to assimilate the transgression of the laws in a general tactics of subjection.

Penality would then appear to be a way of handling illegalities, of laying down

the limits of tolerance, of giving free rein to some, of putting pressure on others,

of excluding a particular section, of making another useful, of neutralizing certain

individuals and of profiting from others.

I am confident, on the basis of serving on French dissertation committees and on

intellectual encounters of other kinds, that this general attitude remains very pervasive.

Currently, the main term of art is that of a “dispositif” – any kind of institution or

behavioral pattern that can be claimed to have the effect or function, directly or

indirectly, in the short run or in the long run, of perpetuating the rule of the elites. We

can learn from Foucault’s own words how he erected this apparatus into some kind of

supraindividual agent:

I understand by the term “apparatus” [dispositif] a sort of - shall we say - formation

which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to

an urgent need. The apparatus thus has a dominant strategic function. This may

have been, for example, the assimilation of a floating population found to be

burdensome for an essentially mercantilist economy: there was a strategic

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imperative acting here as the matrix for an apparatus which gradually undertook

the control or subjection of madness, sexual illness and neurosis.

The functionalism of Pierre Bourdieu relies in part on his concept of “habitus”, or

“disposition to act” in a certain way. By and large, the existence of a habitus is proved

only by the phenomena it purports to explain. The appeal to this idea reminds me of

Molière’s parody of the soft obscurantists of his day. He pictures a candidate for a

medical degree being solemnly asked why opium puts people to sleep. Just as

solemnly, the candidate replies “because there is in it a dormitive power whose nature

it is to lull the senses to sleep”. The answer is greeted by a happy congratulatory

chorus: “You have responded well indeed, you are most worthy to join our learned

brotherhood!” Today, he would have received a high citation count.

Bourdieu’s functionalism also relies in part on his tendency to see strategies

everywhere. Every behavior that directly or indirectly benefits the agent is presented as

a strategic behavior, even in the absence of any evidence that the agent intended his

behavior to produce these benefits. Thus even behavior that is motivated by purely

disinterested concerns is viewed as strategic, because disinterestedness is often

rewarded.

Among the other entries in the bottom right-hand cell of the table, let me briefly

mention psychoanalysis. In France and Argentina, and to a lesser extent in other

countries, this approach to the mind is still taken seriously. As a theoretical enterprise,

it lacks any scientific foundation. With some important exceptions, the study of

psychoanalysis is a waste of time. This is particularly true of the more extreme

representatives, such as Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein. Since I cannot in this short

talk offer evidence, let me just cite from a recent editorial in Nature:

Psychology: a reality check

Anyone reading Sigmund Freud’s original work might well be seduced by the

beauty of his prose, the elegance of his arguments and the acuity of his intuition.

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But those with a grounding in science will also be shocked by the abandon with

which he elaborates his theories on the basis of essentially no empirical

evidence. This is one of the reasons why Freudian-style psychoanalysis has long

since fallen out of fashion: its huge expense – treatments can stretch over years –

is not balanced by evidence of efficacy (Nature editorial October 15 2009)

The two phrases I have italicized correspond to my charges of obscurantism and

waste. Although psychoanalysis as a form of therapy may have fallen out of fashion

in many countries, many scholars still rely on its theoretical framework.

I shall not dwell on multiculturalism and post-modernism as sources of waste, but

simply cite the penetrating criticisms by Brian Barry, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.

But let me say a few words about Marxism. I used to belong to the so-called “non-

bullshit Marxist” group, created around 1980, in which we tried to sort out what was

living from what was dead in the thought of Karl Marx. We were so successful in the

negative task that in the end very little was left. In my own view, the only contribution

of Marx that is left standing is his normative conception of the good life as one of

active and joint self-realization. Marxist theory has nothing to contribute to empirical

social science. Yet in spite of its intellectual bankruptcy, Marxism continues to be

taught in universities all over the world, in the characteristically obscurantist style of

shared verbal reflexes masquerading as arguments.

From waste, let me turn to the harm that can be caused by soft obscurantism. In

the 1960s and beyond, Bruno Bettelheim persuaded many that the cause of autism lay

in uncaring parents, especially in the “refrigerator mother”. The view, which had no

basis in evidence and is today known to be false, caused needless feelings of guilt in

parents of autistic children. Similarly,

The fact that the memories of victims and witnesses can be false or inaccurate

even though they believe them to be true has important implications for the legal

system and for those who counsel and treat victims of crimes. Some

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psychotherapists use techniques that are suggestive (along the lines of, «you don’t

remember sexual abuse, but you have the symptoms, so let’s just imagine who

might have done it»). These can lead patients to false beliefs and memories,

causing great damage to the patients themselves and to those who are accused. In

one Illinois case, psychiatrist Bennett Braun was accused by his patient, Patricia

Burgus, of using drugs and hypnosis to convince her that she possessed 300

personalities, ate meat loaf made of human flesh and was a high priestess in a

satanic cult. By some estimates, thousands of people have been harmed in similar

ways by well-meaning providers who apply a ‘cure’ that ends up being worse

than the disease. (Elizabeth Loftus)

In a Norwegian case, a father was accused of sexual abuse of his daughter. On the

basis of her statements, an expert psychologist testified that the sharp fence posts in the

child’s drawing of a house surrounded by a fence very likely had a sexual significance.

She affirmed, moreover, that the number of posts in the fence very probably indicated

the number of occasion on which the child had been abused. The child’s father spent

two weeks in jail, in a security cell, was barely acquitted of incest, but his life was

ruined. Later, the child confessed that it was all an invention. The alleged perpetrator

was the victim.

It goes without saying that in one sense, Marxism has caused untold harm. Whether

Marxism as a theory, rather than a practice or a rationalization for actions undertaken

on other grounds, has done actual harm is not obvious. The Stalinist idea of “objective

complicity”, while consistent with some functionalist aspects of Marxism, probably

reflects a very general tendency of the human mind. The more specific idea of “crisis

maximization” or la politique du pire – things have to get worse (be made worse)

before they can get better – does perhaps have a more direct Marxist ancestry. Here

again, however, there are many non-Marxist examples of this strategy. After 1790,

Louis XVI used it, for instance. On a more general level, however, Marx’s successors

took over his intellectual hubris and notably his belief in an historical progression with

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a desirable, inevitable and foreseeable outcome. The most serious charge that can be

laid against Marx is that his contempt for what he called “bourgeois rights” probably

had a direct influence on the massive human rights violations that his successors

carried out.

Let me conclude this discussion of soft obscurantism by a provocative question:

might the science of man, as well as society itself, have been better off if Marx and

Freud had never lived? I am not prepared to argue for an affirmative answer to this

question, but I do not think it can be dismissed out of hand.

I now move on to discuss what for many will be more controversial and surprising

claims about hard obscurantism.

There have been many attempts to explain human behavior using quantitative

models. The most prominent ones are perhaps rational-choice theory, including game

theory, agent-based modeling, and network theory. What little I know about the last

two tends to make me skeptical, but I cannot make any strong claims about them. A

long familiarity with rational-choice models has, however, fostered a skepticism that

is, I hope, better grounded.

Before I state the grounds for my skepticism of rational-choice theory, let me

emphasize that for some purposes it is highly valuable. In my opinion, the

development of rational choice theory, as a conceptual tool for understanding human

action and interaction, has been the greatest achievement of the social sciences to date.

I shall give some examples later. It is, moreover, an indispensable policy tool for

changing behavior, for the simple reason that people usually respond to incentives in

predictable ways. What I deny is that it has a privileged status as an explanatory tool.

To achieve explanatory success, a theory should, minimally, satisfy two criteria: it

should have determinate implications for behavior, and the implied behavior should be

what we actually observe. These are necessary conditions, not sufficient ones.

Rational-choice theory often fails on both counts. The theory may be indeterminate,

and people may be irrational. In what was perhaps the first sustained criticism of the

theory, Keynes emphasized indeterminacy, notably because of the pervasive presence

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of uncertainty. His criticism applied especially to cases where agents have to form

expectations about the behavior of other agents or about the development of the

economy in the long run. In the wake of the current economic crisis, this objection has

returned to the forefront. Before the crisis, going back to the 1970s, the main

objections to the theory were based on pervasive irrational behavior. Experimental

psychology and behavioral economics have uncovered many mechanisms that cause

people to deviate from the behavior that rational-choice theory prescribes.

Disregarding some more technical sources of indeterminacy, the most basic one is

embarrassingly simple: how can one impute to the social agents the capacity to make

the calculations that occupy many pages of mathematical appendixes in the leading

journals of economics and political science and that can be acquired only through

years of professional training? Here are some frequently made answers to this

question, with my rejoinders:

1. We should accept a theory if it produces correct predictions even if we do not understand how it does so (quantum mechanics). Rejoinder: the social sciences produce very few correct predictions, except for the short-term impact of small changes in economic variables.

2. Even though agents are incapable of intentional maximizing in complex situations, natural or social selection will eliminate non-maximizers. Rejoinder: this is mere handwaving. No explicit model exists.

3. Individual errors will cancel each other in the aggregate. Rejoinder: there is no reason to think that errors are symmetrically distributed around the correct answer.

4. An expert billiard player whose experience helps him figure out the angles would be utterly incapable of solving the relevant equations; yet he acts as if he could. Rejoinder: nobody can be an expert in all the situations economists apply rational-choice theory. Development of expertise in any field is said to require 10, 000 hours of practice.

With regard to irrationality, I shall only produce a list of robust mechanisms that

have been shown to generate behavior that violates rational-choice theory:

• hyperbolic time discounting

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• loss aversion

• the sunk-cost fallacy and the planning fallacy (especially deadly in conjunction)

• the tendency of unusual events to trigger stronger emotional reactions (an implication of “norm theory”)

• the cold-hot and hot-cold empathy gaps

• trade-off aversion and ambiguity aversion

• anchoring in the elicitation of beliefs and preferences

• the representativeness and availability heuristics

• the conjunction and disjunction fallacies

• the certainty effect and the pseudo-certainty effect

• choice bracketing, framing, and mental accounting

• sensitiveness to changes from a reference point rather than to absolute levels

• status quo bias and the importance of default options

• meliorizing rather than maximizing

• motivated reasoning and self-serving biases in judgment

• flaws of expert judgments and of expert predictions

• self-signaling and magical thinking

• non-consequentialist and reason-based choice

• overconfidence and the illusion of control

• spurious pattern-finding

Many scholars – not just rational-choice theorists – find the rapidly expanding

array of mechanisms uncomfortably large. Some are also worried by the fact that

unlike rational-choice economics, behavioral economics does not rest on a unified

theory. Rather, it consists of a bunch of theories or mechanisms that are not

deductively linked among themselves. Human behavior seems to be guided by a

number of unrelated quirks rather than by consistent maximization of utility. In fact,

there are so many quirks that one suspects that for any observed behavior, there would

be a quirk that fits it. While these qualms are understandable, they do not amount to

reasoned criticism. Behavioral economics is here to stay.

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With regard to data analysis, I cannot make claims to first-hand competence. I rely

on the work of David Freedman, an acknowledged master of pure and applied

statistics. He carried out detailed analyses of six articles published in leading academic

journals: four from American Political Science Review, one from Quarterly Journal of

Economics, and one from American Sociological Review. One of them was named

“best article of the year” by the journal where it appeared. The number of mistakes and

confusions that he finds – some of them so elementary that even I could understand

them – is staggering.

Friedman demonstrated the many pitfalls, fallacies and temptations that arise in

regression analysis as it is routinely carried out. He also observed that social scientists

fail to take an elementary precaution that would reduce the risk of “data mining” and

“curve fitting”. They could put half the data in cold storage, as it were, estimate the

model against the other half, and then see how well the estimated model fits the data in

cold storage. Whereas this procedure is a routine practice in medical or biological

studies, it is not recommended in social science textbooks nor required by social

science journals. It seems to me that the neglect of an existing cure for bias itself

amounts to a form of bias.

Let me cite two of my favorite among Friedman’s statements. The first is taken

from a famous article on “Statistical models and shoe leather”:

A crude four-point scale may be useful:

1. Regression usually works, although it is (like anything else) imperfect and

may sometimes go wrong.

2. Regression sometimes works in the hands of skillful practitioners, but it

isn’t suitable for routine use.

3. Regression might work, but it hasn’t yet.

4. Regression can’t work.

Textbooks, courtroom testimony, and newspaper interviews seem to put

regression into category 1. Category 4 seems too pessimistic. My own view

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is bracketed by categories 2 and 3, although good examples are quite hard to

find. (David Friedman,)

When I have presented my objections to data analysis to various audiences, my

critics have usually located themselves at point (1) of this scale.

The second statement I shall cite offers a caricature – which like any good

caricature reveals important features of its object – of the responses that modelers

might make to his criticism:

The Modelers’ Responses

We know all that. Nothing is perfect. Linearity has to be a good first

approximation. Log linearity has to be a good first approximation. The

assumptions are reasonable. The assumptions don’t matter. The assumptions

are conservative. You can’t prove the assumptions are wrong. The biases

will cancel. We can model the biases. We’re only doing what everybody else

does. Now we use more sophisticated techniques. If we don’t do it, someone

else will. What would you do? The decision maker has to be better off with

us than without us. We all have mental models, not using a model is still a

model. The models aren’t totally useless. You have to do the best you can

with the data. You have to make assumptions in order to make progress. You

have to give the models the benefit of the doubt. Where’s the harm? (David

Friedman.)

I shall return to the question of harm. First, however, there is the issue of

waste. I believe that much work in economics and political science that is inspired

by rational-choice theory is devoid of any explanatory, aesthetic or mathematical

interest, which means that it has no value at all. I cannot make a quantitative

assessment of the proportion of work in leading journals that fall in this category,

but I am confident that it represents waste on a staggering scale. I believe, but less

confidently, that the same is true is true of many instances of data analysis.

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The amount of harm is more difficult to assess. I do not know of any detailed

study discussing the importance of modeler hubris in the 1998 collapse of Long

Term Capital Management, costing investors 4.5 billion dollars, or in the current

financial crisis. Greed, short-termism and deregulation may have been more

important than unwarranted confidence in the Nobel-prize-winning models.

Although one can cite many examples of fund managers telling their clients that

according to their models a crisis of the magnitude of what has happened since

2007 would only occur once in n years, n being some very large number, it

remains to be shown that these managers actually believed in the models and used

them as decision premises. After all, as we have learned, they had very little to

lose if the models got it wrong.

This being said, I find it hard to believe that excessive belief in the efficiency

of markets and the rationality of market participants did not play some role in

generating the crisis. Since the information that is reflected in prices is a public

good, nobody has an incentive to produce it. This free-rider problem generates

mechanical diversification of assets as a substitute for due diligence. The “Warren

Buffett remedy”, similar to the “shoe-leather sociology” that David Freedman

proposed to keep data analysis honest, is shoe leather investment.

Turning now to the possible harm caused by data analysis, we may consider

the impact of Chicago-style economics on legislation concerning the death

penalty and gun control. In one summary,

In 1975, Isaac Ehrlich's analysis of national time-series data led him to claim

that each execution saved eight lives. Solicitor General Robert Bork cited

Ehrlich’s work to the Supreme Court a year later, and the Court, while

claiming not to have relied on the empirical evidence, ended the death

penalty moratorium when it upheld various capital punishment statutes in

Gregg v. Georgia and related cases.

Although Ehrlich’s work was discredited, a new wave of studies claimed to

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have found similar effects. Commenting on an analysis that challenged these

findings, Ehrlich said that ”If variations like unemployment, income inequality,

likelihood of apprehension and willingness to use the death penalty are accounted

for, the death penalty shows a significant deterring effect”. In sobering contrast,

Christopher Achen warns that “A statistical specification with more than three

explanatory variables is meaningless”. There are just too many ways to fiddle

with the numbers.

Similar remarks apply to a claim by John Lott cited by John Ashcroft as

Attorney General in the Bush administration - that the right to carry concealed

handguns saves lives. Commenting on Lott’s work, one scholar writes that “The

academic survival of a flawed study may not be of much consequence. But,

unfortunately, the ill-effects of a bad policy, influenced by flawed research, may

hurt generations.” In other words, we can tolerate waste, but we should not accept

harm.

The advocates of the death penalty and right-to-carry laws will respond that

these measures tend to reduce harm. In a discussion of life-life tradeoffs, Cass

Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule defend the death penalty on these grounds. To be

sure, they qualify their argument as a conditional one, valid only if the empirical

claims stand up. Yet they display considerable hubris when, as legal scholars with

no econometric training, they assert that “One leading study finds that as a

national average, each execution deters some eighteen murders” and proceed to

discuss the implications. If they had read David Freedman, they would have

understood that the idea of executing people on the basis of any kind of statistical

analysis is morally unacceptable. There is just too much uncertainty about the

facts to warrant this irreversible action.

If you are willing to grant me the claim that soft and hard obscurantism are

sufficiently widespread to justify worry, you may have asked themselves about

their causes. As I said at the outset, the causes may be psychological,

sociological, or institutional.

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At the psychological level, hard obscurantism may be due to the widespread

belief that “social science” can or must become a science, on the model of the

natural sciences. While talk about “physics-envy” may be too strong, there may

be an unconscious desire to emulate the most prestigious scientific disciplines.

The highly sophisticated theories hold out the promise of satisfying this desire. At

a more mundane level, the high prestige of mathematical social science goes

together with very high salaries. A young scholar with a talent for mathematics

may easily be lured by the prospect of rising to the top of the profession. At the

same time, the normal workings of self-deception may prevent him from

understanding that he is weaving a web of froth. Finally, self-selection may cause

recruitment into these professions to be biased in favor of scholars who are

subject to the relevant forms of hypertrophy and atrophy to begin with.

To understand the psychological roots of soft obscurantism, I suggest that we

turn to the phenomenology of scholarship. When we believe we have found the

cause of a phenomenon, there occurs a mental click of satisfaction. Other mental

operations can also trigger clicks. There is the click of observing a similarity

between the phenomenon and another one, the click of observing that the

phenomenon has consequences that benefit someone or something, and the click

of observing that some other phenomenon could have been the cause of the

phenomenon we are studying. Because all these observations satisfy our deep-

seated need to find order, patterns and meanings in the universe, they trigger a

click that is easily mistaken for the real thing, which is the click of explanation. I

offer this not as an established truth, but as a hypothesis that might explain the

grip that analogies, functional explanations and just-so stories have on the mind.

These attempted shortcuts to knowledge also owe a great deal of their attraction to

our unwillingness to admit ignorance. As Montaigne said, “Many of this world’s

abuses are engendered - or to put it more rashly, all of this world’s abuses are

engendered - by our being schooled to be afraid to admit our ignorance and

because we are required to accept anything which we cannot refute.”

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Although these explanatory suggestions may, in a given case, have some

force, they lack the necessary sociological dimension. The persistence over time

of pseudo-science at a large scale is a collective phenomenon, which must be

sustained by mechanisms of social interaction. I shall discuss two possible

mechanisms: mind-binding and pluralistic ignorance.

The idea of mind-binding draws on the practice of foot-binding of Chinese

women. Although crippling and horribly painful, foot-binding persisted as a bad

equilibrium. Given that no parents would let their son marry a woman who did

not have her feet bound, it was in the interest of the parents of girls to adhere to

the practice. No family had an incentive to deviate unilaterally. Yet the practice

stopped, over the span of a few decades, by successful collective action. Because

people came to perceive that the practice made everybody worse off than they

could be, groups of parents came together to pledge in public that they would not

bind the feet of their daughters nor marry their sons to women whose feet were

bound.

Mind-binding perpetuates hard obscurantism because departments have to

train their students in abstruse mathematical techniques. If they don’t, the students

will not get a job in elite departments, just as Chinese women without their feet

bound could not get married. Mind-binding differs from foot-binding, however, in

an important respect. Even before foot-binding was abolished, it was widely

perceived as absurd and perverse, a perception that eventually led to its demise.

By contrast, most chairs of departments of economics and political science

probably do not perceive themselves as being in a bad equilibrium. To the extent

that individuals scholars are seized with occasional doubts, as, being human, they

can hardly fail to be, a look at what their colleagues are doing may assuage their

worries or at least prevent them from speaking up. This remark brings me to the

second interaction-based mechanism, pluralistic ignorance.

This idea dates from 1835, when Hans Christian Anderson published his tale

about the “Emperor’s New Clothes”. It was given a more theoretical formulation

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five years later, in the second volume of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America,

and then rediscovered by psychologists in the early nineteenth century. In an

extreme case, pluralistic ignorance obtains when no member of a community

believes a certain proposition or espouses a certain value, but each believes that

everybody else holds the belief or the value. In the more common case it obtains

when only a few members hold the belief or the value in question, but most of

them believe that most others do.

In the case of economic and statistical models, pluralistic ignorance would

obtain if each scholar, although secretly worried about the fragility or irrelevance

of the procedures, kept quiet because of the perception that his colleagues are

firmly convinced of their validity. There are several mechanisms that might be at

work here. From my own experience I know very well how a scholar’s

confidence in his own judgment can be undermined by the fact that the majority

thinks differently. How could all these people, who are certainly smarter than I

am, be so wrong? Also, even with unshakeable self-confidence a scholar might

worry that speaking up might cause ostracism and career obstacles.

Finally, hard and soft obscurantism will be hard to eradicate because of recent

institutional developments. Today, the scientific community increasingly seeks to

base tenure decisions and funding decisions on quantitative criteria, notably on

citation counts. To the extent that these criteria are used together with qualitative

criteria, which are based on some competent evaluators actually reading the

literature, this development may not be a bad thing. There is a real danger,

however, that high citation numbers are now turning into a sufficient criterion for

excellence. Since hard obscurantistst tend to cite other hard obscurantists, and soft

obscurantists tend to cite other soft obscurantists, and since there are plenty of

scholars in each camp, they can perpetuate themselves as a group by citing one

another.

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The high citation counts of soft obscurantists are especially striking. If we

look at the number of citations on Google Scholar, we find the following

numbers:

Pierre Bourdieu 92 300

Pierre Bourdieu & “habitus” 48 700

Michel Foucault 202 000

Michel Foucauld & “dispositif” 6 900

Homi Bhabha 29 200

Anthony Giddens 36 100

Jacques Lacan 42 700

Amos Tversky 12 700

Thomas Schelling 7 400

Robert Dahl 14 800

Erving Goffman 26 300

Fredrik Barth 5 500

These are rough numbers. Different search engines give different result. Yet

the order of magnitude is the same.

The first five are soft obscurantists. The last five are not obscurantist at all,

but represent what I believe to be the best or among the best scholars in,

respectively, psychology, economics, political science, sociology and

anthropology over the last half century. As you can see, not even the best serious

scholars can compete with even a marginal soft obscurantist.

By citing the last five names, I have proposed an implicit definition of non-

obscurantist social science. An explicit definition is hard to give. I could simply

say that good social science respects facts, logic, and common sense. But I shall

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try to go beyond that trite statement, by offering some examples of simple, robust

causal mechanisms.

I have already cited two examples: the idea of a bad equilibrium, and that of

pluralistic ignorance. A third example can be taken from Tocqueville’s

Democracy in America.

Our fathers had a peculiar opinion of marriage. Having observed that what

few marriages of inclination were made in their time almost always badly,

they resolutely concluded that it was very dangerous to consult one’s own

heart in such matters. Chance struck them as more clairvoyant than choice

He then goes on to show why this conclusion was unjustified. Suppose that in

an aristocratic society two young people marry for love. By going against the

current they will tend to encounter the hostility of their friends and relatives, a

situation that, as Tocqueville says, “soon breaks their courage and embitters their

hearts”. In a society in which this practice was general, this effect would not arise.

He also points to another mechanism that explains why we cannot generalize from

exceptional cases to the general case. For a man to marry for love in societies in

which this practice is uncommon he must have, in Tocqueville’ words, “a certain

violent and adventurous cast of mind, and people of this character, no matter what

direction they take, rarely arrive at happiness or virtue”. And one might add that a

marriage of two people of this disposition is even less likely to be happy. For me,

this argument is a model of how to think about society.

A further example is provided by an analysis of the puzzling fact that people

sometimes burn their bridges or their boats. It would seem that no rational

individual would ever throw away a resource that might prove useful. Any such

behavior must be irrational. Yet Thomas Schelling showed that it can make perfect

sense. Suppose that the general of Country I is debating whether to invade

Country II to take possession of a contested piece of territory:

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If both generals are rational, Country I will attack and Country II will retreat.

Yet if the general of Country II burns his boats or his bridges, making retreat

impossible, he will have to fight. Because the general of Country I can anticipate

this reaction, he will choose to negotiate. In other words, by discarding one of his

options, the general of Country II can achieve a better outcome. Sometimes, less is

more.

The analyses of bad equilibria and of the rationality of burning one’s bridges

rely on game theory, one of the most powerful tools of the social sciences. It is the

perfect tool for understanding the conceptual structure of human interaction. It can

help us understand why people sometimes do not cooperate even when it is in

their objective interest to do so, and why in other situations they do manage to

cooperate. Game theory is only useful, however, to the extent that it does not

impute excessive cognitive abilities to social agents. When it does so, it ceases to

be social science and turns into science fiction, or hard obscurantism.

Thomas Schelling once told me that before he wrote his path-breaking work

The Strategy of Conflict, in which he showed how it could be rational to burn

one’s bridges, he spent a year or two reading randomly in military history. I

believe in fact that history should be one of the two unifying disciplines of the

social sciences. By virtue of their knowledge, good historians can pick out the

“telling detail” as well as the “robust anomaly”, thus providing both stimulus and

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reality check for theorists. The other unifying discipline is what one might call the

science of choice. Today the study of choice is divided among psychology, micro-

economics, and behavioral economics. In the future I believe these will fuse into a

single discipline, relying on laboratory experiments as well as on field studies.

If I am right, my conclusions also have implications for graduate training in

the social sciences. Today, students of sociology have to read Durkheim, Marx

and Weber; students of economics read Adam Smith and Ricardo; students of

political science read Aristotle, Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau. Without denying

that these readings can be useful, I find it scandalous that students are not also

required to read works in social history, economic history, and political history. At

the same time, they should learn how to do laboratory experiments and field

experiments to test their theories.

Some students could, to be sure, be left to pursue the abstract mathematical

models. Attempts to understand the actions and interactions of ideally rational

agents, who have never existed and never will, can have a certain aesthetic value.

They may even on occasion have some mathematical value. As long as nobody

pretends that the models have an explanatory value, they will not be privileged in

the curriculum or in the reward system, as they are today.

In conclusion, I have to confess some skepticism about whether my

arguments will have an impact. Soft obcurantists are not interested in arguments.

The only way to affect them is to make them shoot themselves in the foot, as Alan

Sokal did in his famous hoax, but as the obscurantists are now forewarned, that is

unlikely to happen again. As for hard obscurantism, the guild of economists and

high-tech political scientists forms an almost impregnable bastion of highly skilled

professionals, who do not believe in anyone’s credentials but their own. They will

not listen to outsider criticism. Although insider critics are now somewhat more

common than they were thirty years ago, they usually, in my opinion, share too

many assumptions with the obscurantists.

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While I am afraid that obscurantism is here to stay, I do not think it will come

to dominate the social sciences completely. I have great faith in the invincible

curiosity of the human mind.

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