A National Prefrontal Lobotomy: The Costs of Cutting the Social Sciences

Issue 158: The long-term impacts of funding cuts threaten "social science for a safer world"

Last Thursday, Jay was sitting in his office with a team of leading scholars frantically working on a research proposal to study the spread of extremism and misinformation around the world. How does extremist content go viral online? What factors cause this content to spill over into real-world violence and anti-democratic behavior? And can we create scalable interventions to target and prevent intergroup conflict before it grows out of control?

Jay’s project had already been selected by officials at the MINERVA Research Initiative at the United States Department of Defense for a full proposal that would potentially fund his lab—and three of his collaborators at Harvard University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona— for the next five years. This funding competition, billed by the Pentagon as “Social science for a safer world,” was established in 2008, partially in response to lessons learned following the terror attacks on 9/11/2001 .

In the middle of…