COSSA is delighted with the substantial percentage increase in the President’s proposed budget for the SBE directorate.  However, because of its small base, the absolute dollar increase remains smaller than the research opportunities in the areas this directorate supports.  In addition, for Fiscal 2003, NSF has designated the SBE directorate a “priority area,” and provided it with a down-payment on significant increases in the future.  As Norman Bradburn, the Assistant Director for SBE, told COSSA’s 20^th Anniversary symposium, new tools will enable the social and behavioral sciences to expand their research and produce new breakthroughs.  These tools include:  neuroimaging, collaboratories, wireless computers, web-based surveys, geographic information systems, and statistical techniques like data mining and hierarchical analysis.  In particular, the importance of data mining techniques grows more important as the quantity and complexity of data grows immense.   

SBE Research and Technological Change 

SBE will support research with the use of these new tools to study how technology and society advance through continual interactions.  Rapid technological change impacts all areas of our lives.  We need to know how this alters our economic, political and social systems.  It has clearly led to the growth of new businesses in areas of biotechnology, geographic information systems, and now nanotechnology.   Social and behavioral scientists continue to study how these new tools have impacted business organizations and the SBE’s Innovation and Organizational Change program is at the forefront of supporting this research.    

As members of Congress know, the new technologies have changed how we communicate with our decision-makers, and have also raised the possibilities of voting through the Internet.  We have also tragically learned that these tools also create opportunities for anti-government groups to communicate and plan acts of destruction.  They also raise questions of how governmental policies regarding intellectual property and privacy can be sustained in the face of all this change. SBE continues to support research in all of these areas.   

Our educational system has been overwhelmed by the introduction of technologies in the classroom and their use as a pedagogical tool.  Yet, we still know little about its impact on learning.  The social consequences of the Internet and other new forms of interpersonal communication also need investigation.  How individuals interact with each other and with their society are also being affected by technology.  Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone suggests that Americans have become less community oriented.  September 11 may have changed that.  However, we need to study the manifestations of that change and whether it has staying power.  

SBE stands ready to support studies on the social, political, and economic consequences of all of these changes and needs a significant influx of funds to do it.  We urge you to support the SBE priority with a substantial increase for the SBE directorate.  

SBE Research and Terrorism 

The tragic events of September 11 have certainly changed how Americans look at the world and their country.  Utilizing hypotheses and tools derived from research on reactions to earlier disasters, natural and man-made, SBE investigators have studied the reactions of people to the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings.   

Using Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER), NSF’s SBE directorate was able to rapidly fund post-September 11 research in Social Psychology, studying such issues as:  predicting affective reactions to collective loss; how individuals respond to a salient and pervasive health threat such as anthrax; resiliency and coping in the wake of the attacks and ongoing threats.  SGER awards were also made in other SBE programs: Human Cognition and Perception, Geography, Sociology, and Political Science.  The sociology awards included one for a supplement to the General Social Survey for field work starting on September 13 to assess attitudes towards a number of issues, including confidence in government, civil liberties, and health issues.  Another award was for a post-crisis analysis of attitudes and values of the Islamic public in Egypt, Iran and Morocco. 

The SBE directorate’s long-term approach to research on terrorism includes the expectation of increased funding for basic research in a number of areas, including:  the communication of risk; decision-making and responses of institutions, governments, organizations and social groups to extreme events including terrorism, natural and human-generated disasters; the structure, formation, and behavior of social groups and networks; formation, mobilization, trajectories and consequences of social protest; social identities of immigrant, racial, and ethnic groups;  experimental studies on the formation of status beliefs, trust and cooperation;  fundamental research on democratization; multi-linguality (basic linguistic research on the structure of languages underlying natural language understanding, speech recognition and automatic translation); corpus linguistics, the statistical and linguistic analysis of bodies of text, including written documents email correspondence to discover patterns and regularities that can be used  for analysis, including source attribution;  developmental research, including research on adolescence, to examine attitude formation, group behavior and the effects of mediators of learning, transfer of learning and environmental factors on behavior, emotion, cognition, and perception. 

Since terrorists are people, and terrorism is behavior, SBE scientists are participating in the National Academy of Sciences’ efforts to help understand terrorism, terrorists, and how to stop further destructive actions.  There is a sub-panel, chaired by Neil Smelser, of the Branscomb-Klausner committee, that is investigating the social/behavorial aspects of terrorism.  In addition, the National Research Council’s Committee on Law and Justice has instituted a roundtable chaired by Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff and former Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann, which explored many issues at its first meeting on March 18.  One of these used basic research on adolescent behavior to examine how young men are recruited into terrorist groups.  The other focused on criminal deterrence research to look at disincentives for participating in terrorist activity.  Also at the meeting Martha Crenshaw, a political scientist presented a history of terrorist activities in the past thirty years, that puts September 11 into perspective. 

NSF has also funded a workshop that helped geographers develop a research agenda on terrorism.  Geographers were instrumental in helping New York City respond to the attacks on September 11 by using geographic information systems to dispatch rescue teams and disaster response units.  The geographers will employ their experience in researching hazards and natural disasters, regional and international activities, and the tools of geospatial data and technologies to examine all aspects of terrorism.  Recently, psychologists, political scientists and others have met with the FBI Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, VA to their expertise from their research experiences to combating terrorism in the U.S.  Much of the basic research that contributes to these activities has been supported by NSF’s SBE directorate. 

Social and Behavioral Science Research Contributions to Public Policy 

As part of the Consortium’s 20^th Anniversary, late last year we published Fostering Human Progress:  Social and Behavioral Contributions to Public Policy.  In the book, COSSA discussed how social and behavioral research has impacted six societal goals:  Creating A Safer World; Increasing Prosperity, Improving Health, Educating the Nation, Promoting Fairness, and Protecting the Environment.  Many of the research studies cited either had initial NSF support or grew out of the basic research supported by the Foundation.  This includes the training of researchers and policy makers. 

One example of the NSF supported research under Creating A Safer World focuses on the difficulties nations have had with their transitions to democracy.  Research conducted by James Gibson of Washington University, St. Louis, Donna Bahry of Vanderbilt, and Brian Silver of Michigan State have examined the struggles in Russia, while Gibson has also looked at South Africa. 

Another aspect of Creating A Safer World deals with reductions in personal violence.  The NSF-supported National Consortium on Violence Research continues to research into the causes and correlates of crime and the impacts of various policies on big city crime reduction in recent years. 

Nobel Prizes validate research that helped Increase Prosperity.  The 2001 award went to three NSF supported economists – George Ackerlof, Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz -- for their fundamental contributions to the understanding of asymmetric markets.  These are markets in which one side has more information than the other.  The film and book “A Beautiful Mind,” illustrated that game theory and its applications have also played a significant part in our understanding of prosperity and markets.  Robert Solow’s Nobel winning work on economic growth and the importance of technology to that growth is still studied and refined today.  Another Nobel prize winner, Robert Mundell, researched exchange rates, which helped lay the intellectual groundwork for Europe’s common currency. 

Improving Health is not just a biomedical research endeavor, nor does it just result from discoveries in the physical sciences and engineering.   Basic research in the social/behavioral sciences has examined the importance of lifestyle and behavior to good health.  Interventions to change behavior stem from basic research in social psychology and other behavioral sciences.  Studies of aging also utilize research in linguistics to examine how older people communicate and use language. 

Enormous contributions from the social and behavioral sciences influence how we Educate the Nation.  The discoveries in basic cognitive science have determined how children learn.  Research on childhood development focuses on the importance of early social relationships as a source of either support and adaptation or risk and dysfunction.  The NSF support for Science of Learning Centers, Research on Learning and Education (ROLE), and the Interagency Education Research Initiative (IERI) carry on this research and merits support.  In addition, the Children’s Research Initiative deserves enhanced funding. 

In Promoting Fairness, the study of how our legal system works has been a province of NSF’s Law and Social Science program for many years.  Support for research of the jury system has resulted in landmark studies on how those bodies make their decisions.  Research into police investigation practices has also discovered the difficulties of using eyewitness identifications and line-ups as evidence in criminal trials.  

In studies associated with Promoting the Environment, social scientists have played a significant role in researching various responses to environmental degradation.  Economists, such as William Nordhaus of Yale, have developed models to examine the economics of global climate change.  Geographers have demonstrated the importance of mitigation and adaptation strategies.  The NSF-supported Center for Integrative Assessment at Carnegie Mellon University discovered that slowly changing environmental conditions did not tend to motivate adaptation and mitigation strategies.  Other scientists have looked at societal responses to environmental challenges.  Economists have developed cost/benefit analysis that has been an important tool in regulatory responses to environmental problems.  Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues at Indiana’s Center for the Study of Institutions, Population and Environmental Change have had NSF support to devise ways for institutions to equitably manage common pool resources such as fisheries, grazing grounds, and water supplies. 

On all these issues of public policy and others, NSF support for basic research in the social, behavioral and economic sciences has been vital.  COSSA urges the Subcommittee to enhance that support. 

Other Issues 

COSSA also supports increased funding for the Graduate Research Fellows program.  It is time to provide the funds to increase the stipends to make them competitive with other federal agencies’ graduate fellows.  Increasing the stipends should not occur as a trade off with the number of fellowships available.  The stipends should be increased without a corresponding reduction in the number of these prestigious, portable, student controlled support for graduate training. 

            The SBE directorates’ Science, Resources and Statistics division is slated for a significant increase.  This boost would allow for the once-per-decade incorporation of the results of the decennial census to redesign the samples and surveys used to collect data on the scientific and engineering workforce.  We urge the Subcommittee to support this increase.  

            COSSA is concerned that the proposed project for neutrino research for the Homestake Mine in South Dakota, if funded without peer review and National Science Board approval, would create a dangerous precedent for NSF.  The NSF budget must remain free of directed spending to a specific project that has not been through the merit review process.  We are also concerned that the indemnification and liability costs, if incurred by NSF without large infusions of new funds, would dwarf NSF’s other programs.  We urge the Subcommittee to examine this project and ensure that NSF’s integrity and budget are protected. 

Conclusion 

            The National Science Foundation remains the key funding agency for fundamental research in the social and behavioral sciences.  Indeed, it is the premier funding agency in the world for basic research across all the sciences and engineering.  The SBE community joins with the rest of the science community and the business and industrial community in supporting a substantial increase for NSF.  We urge the Subcommittee to be as generous as it can in providing NSF with the support it needs to keep the U.S. on top in science and engineering to provide this nation and the world with the scientific and technological advances that will, as John Kennedy said, “light the world,” and bring us back from the darkness of September 11. 

            Thank you for the opportunity to present COSSA’s views on the FY 2003 budget for the National Science Foundation and its Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences directorate.