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;