Without Social and Behavioral Research

We would have no reliable measures of public opinion;
Politicians would be unable to rely on scientific polling results during their campaigns;
Geographic information systems would be less able to help in disasters, local and environmental planning and helping to run our modern society;
We would have little information on how children learn;
Economic indicators such as the Gross Domestic Product, Consumer Price Index, and Balance-of-Trade would not exist;
Cigarette smoking and lung cancer rates would be at all time highs;
The country would have much less understanding of relations among the races;
Criminal justice officials would not have evidence of criminal career patterns;
Understanding how we learn languages would be more difficult;
We would know and understand even less about foreign cultures and leaders;
We would not understand risk taking behavior;
The relationship between behavior and health would not be firmly established;
We would understand even less about how to communicate in disaster situations;
Health disparities would not be on the national agenda;
We would know less about how people make decisions;
The AIDS pandemic would be far worse than it is now;
Our armed forces would be less effective in training recruits;
The overturning of “separate-but-equal” in the Brown v. Board of Education case and the judicial decision upholding the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would have been much harder;
Santayana would be right: Those who don’t understand history would repeat it;