A Decadal Survey of the Social and Behavioral Sciences A Research Agenda for Advancing Intelligence Analysis (2019) / Chapter Skim
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9 Strengthening Ties Between the Two Communities
9 Strengthening Ties Between the Two Communities
Pages 289-310
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We begin with reflections on what we learned about the relationship between these two communities from the process of conducting this decadal survey, and then explore past collaborations between the two communities, drawing lessons from both successful and less-successful experiences and offering our conclusions about ways to strengthen these ties. LESSONS FROM CONDUCTING THE DECADAL SURVEY The committee was asked to reflect on the process of conducting this decadal survey and identify insights and practices that could be useful for any future such studies in social and behavioral sciences (SBS)
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Indeed, although there is in a sense a community of SBS researchers -- in that researchers in these fields share many common interests -- SBS is by no means a single discipline. No institution or entity links all members of this set of disciplines; rather, the various SBS disciplines form an abstract community that encompasses a wide range of theories and methods.
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. SBS researchers and engineers, computer scientists, and physicists take different approaches even when addressing the same phenomena (Borgatti et al., 2009)
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Applying the decadal survey process to the IC context had another significant benefit. The committee cast the widest possible net in seeking white papers and other input from the SBS community (refer to Chapter 1 and Appendix B)
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Collaborations between the security and SBS communities began to play a critical and sustained role in military operations, and to expand to intelligence issues beyond military concerns, once the United States became involved in World War II. Since then, research partnerships between the two communities have generated important scientific insights and provided valuable support for intelligence and security activities, although the relationship has not always been smooth.
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-- hired political scientists, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and economists to support such functions as analyzing foreign intelligence, assessing enemy and allied morale, screening and training intelligence operatives, calculating the enemy's military capacity, and identifying optimal bombing routes and payloads (O'Rand, 1992)
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Together with the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) -- created by ODNI in 2006 -- DARPA continues to support research that combines computational tools with SBS knowledge to develop social forecasting techniques and other approaches to improved human and organizational decision making.
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, the project generated results valued by both IARPA and SBS researchers and has been adopted by the National Intelligence Council. The project demonstrated the validity of forecasting tournaments as predictive tools and provided IARPA with insights into best practices for designing and running such tournaments.
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From 1955 to 1962, for example, a Michigan State University program that allegedly provided public administration training in South Vietnam served as cover for a CIA-funded counterespionage training program that was implicated in accusations of torture and assassination in South Vietnam. SBS researchers and the IC have taken these experiences to heart.
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. Project Camelot also was emblematic of the failure of SBS researchers and their sponsors to balance scientific and national security goals.
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. SBS research projects during the Vietnam War era also include cases in which government funders were let down by SBS researchers who failed to provide rigorous and relevant expertise.
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We look briefly here at three key issues: ethics and values in a research context, emerging ethical standards in a world of big data, and the reproducibility of research findings. Ethics and Values in a Research Context Neither SBS research nor intelligence analysis is a value-free enterprise.
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Revelations about controversial intelligence practices in the first decade of the 21st century -- from extraordinary rendition;4 to the National Security Agency's bulk data collection programs; to harsh interrogation methods, including methods based in psychological research (Voosen, 2015) -- also have fostered concerns about intelligence and security practices among the public.
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One example of such concern arises from the dramatic development of new data sources, such as social media mining and new computational social science techniques that can be used to analyze and possibly shape population sentiments. In 2018, controversy was sparked by revelations that the private research firm Cambridge Analytica was improperly obtaining data on Facebook users and deploying nontransparent and proprietary behavioral technologies to design information campaigns intended to influence human attitudes and actions.
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Military officials also disagreed about an emerging ethical question: whether the test subjects should be considered volunteers to whom risks were disclosed or soldiers involved in training (Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, 1995)
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These episodes are instructive because this report is emerging at a time when the ethics of research using big data are also under scrutiny and in flux. Emerging Ethical Standards in a World of Big Data Advances in computational social science are offering exciting new possibilities for IC-related SBS research, including enhanced analysis of open-source intelligence such as social media data, data collected from sensors, and other digital information produced by routine human actions and behaviors (Harman, 2015)
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. These domains both overlap and conflict, and navigating this terrain will require careful attention to evolving ethical norms and values.
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Collaborations between the two have yielded important scientific and analytic insights, and have functioned well when fund ing sources and agency goals have been transparent, when social and behavioral sciences research questions and agency missions and goals have been harmonized and clear, and when ethical and value-based concerns have been treated with sufficient care. Conversely, the rela tionship has fractured in the past when funding sources have been kept secret or misrepresented, researchers and government agencies have struggled to balance research and agency needs, and research has touched on broader ethical or value-based disagreements.
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. Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America's Universities.
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Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Minerva Research Initiative.
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. Ten simple rules for responsible big data research.
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