Using Science as Evidence in Public Policy (2012) / Chapter Skim
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4 Research on the Use of Science in Policy: A Framework
4 Research on the Use of Science in Policy: A Framework
Pages 53-64
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From page 53... ...
-- said to "increase the use" of science. It focuses on mechanisms for bridging the acknowledged gap be tween scientists and policy makers.
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From page 54... ...
An alternative view is: how can public policy making be improved, and what role can the social sciences play in that improvement? It may be that we have been concentrating too hard on the first formulation and not hard enough on the second.
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From page 55... ...
. The arguments consider not just the policy choice at hand, but how that policy interacts over time with many other policies -- does opening a charter school in the community decrease or increase housing prices; do housing prices affect the local labor supply; does the labor supply affect whether a chain store locates in the community?
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From page 56... ...
is not simply a backdrop for the way users make sense of science as evidence, but actively influences and shapes cognitive processes, including creativity, innovation, learning, and strategic thinking. Situated cognition is a science relevant to organizational design supportive of continuous learning, critical thinking, and learning from experience and experimentation.
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From page 57... ...
. These sciences have not, however, been applied to collective reasoning and group decision making in public policy settings at anything close to the level needed.1 Of primary interest here are the branches of behavioral sciences that deal with social judgment theory (Cooksey, 1996)
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From page 58... ...
And despite the apparent move toward evidence based medicine and comparative effectiveness research, most of us still feel that our own experiences and insights are the most relevant factors in medical decision-making. Policy makers also inhabit a culture that stresses the importance of experience and insight, and this culture is always at play when deciding how much to defer to "guidelines written by academic types." The social science that is needed to understand the use of science is not research about the consequences of those decisions: it is research about the decision process itself.
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From page 59... ...
This challenge notwithstanding, behavioral decision theory and related fields can substantially increase understanding of policy argument and how science is used, misused, and ignored. Such understanding would be reason enough to recommend to cognitive scientists that they direct attention to "policy argumentation." But there is a further reason for including these fields in our research framework: it is becoming clear that cognitive science and behavioral economics can directly address policy design.
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From page 60... ...
. Decision processes that increase stakeholders' commitments and public participation have also met with some success (see National Research Council, 2008)
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From page 61... ...
proposes that the social sciences develop methodologies for measuring and categorizing the complexity of social processes and structure interdisciplinary research to unpack how purposive actors respond to incentives, information, and cultural norms and how their psychological predispositions interact to produce social outcomes. The Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
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From page 62... ...
from the perspective of a social systems theorist and fault applications of social science analysis and research that fail to think through the dynamics of social systems and to pursue research that enables us to model more completely the effects of policy changes. I do not underestimate the difficulty of this task, but it is the direction that I think social sciences must be going.
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From page 63... ...
Our perspective urges broad social science attention to what happens during policy arguments, with a specific focus on whether, why, and how science is used as evidence in public policy.
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