THE RESEARCH Q & A

On October 19, 2007, renowned Princeton sociologist and author Douglas S. Massey addressed LSU as the latest speaker in the Chancellor’s Distinguished Lectureship Series.

A member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Massey is recognized for his expertise in Latin American economic and migration issues, particularly in Mexico. His presentation, titled, “Understanding America’s Immigration Crisis,” detailed the causes and effects of U.S. immigration policy and placed the current debate within historical context.

Dr. Massey offered us a few minutes during his visit to answer the following questions related to contemporary social issues and social science research.

LSU Research : What are the most pressing current issues in sociological research, and what’s on the horizon?

MASSEY : There’s a revolution going on right now in social science. It’s been under the radar but is about to really break out. It’s the revolution in cognitive neuroscience.

There have been unbelievable breakthroughs in what we’re able to learn about how the human brain functions. Historically, economists would assume everyone is rational, forward-looking, has perfect information, and is utility-maximizing. But increasingly we don’t need to assume the way people are; increasingly we know how people are structured, cognitively. And we know now that they’re not rational, utility-maximizing, forward-looking people.

The human brain is composed of two very different components, an emotional component and what’s called a rational component, but which isn’t fully logical.

These two systems interact in complicated ways, and in general, the emotional brain has precedence over the rational brain. It takes a lot of work to get the rational brain to shut down the emotional brain and look at things in a reasonable way.

And even the rational brain, located in the pre-frontal cortex, is not a strictly logical system. It’s actually a giant system of pattern recognition. So we’re programmed not to think about things strictly rationally but to form patterns, put things into categories and make decisions based on these categories. It’s a categorical rather than a strictly logical kind of reasoning, which leads to all kinds of violations of basic economic precepts.

What is coming out of cognitive neuroscience right now is going to have the same effect on the social sciences that the DNA revolution had on the biological sciences. That is, it’s going to start breaking down boundaries; it’s going to erase boundaries between disciplines. If you don’t get on the bandwagon, the revolution’s going to leave you in the dust.

Secondly, there’s a lot to be learned and a lot of important work is going to be done on the bio-social interface. Social scientists know a lot about social processes and structure and how they affect social outcomes; but they also affect biological outcomes [like] health and cognitive development.

A lot of social scientists have this naïve, nineteenth-century view of genetics, where you inherit a gene and it gets expressed. No geneticist believes this anymore. You inherit a gene, and it may or may not be expressed based on interaction with your environment. Environment turns on and off genes. So the question is: What channels people into different sorts of environments?

Social structure becomes the critical feature in trying to understand which human genes get expressed, when, and under what circumstances.

The third revolution is the bringing of context back into social science, moving it away from individual decision models and looking at how individuals interact with a particular social environment.

So, social scientists need to pay attention to what’s happening in cognitive neuroscience. They need to be up on bio-social interactions—the way these things get triggered has much to do with contextual effects in cities and neighborhoods, schools and families

LSU Research: Is it possible to reduce global poverty while promoting economic development, and if so, how do the social sciences contribute to these efforts?

MASSEY: I think the only way to reduce poverty is through global economic development. You have to create more wealth, and you have to distribute it. We’ve created a lot of wealth, but we haven’t distributed it very well. That’s the problem.

I think social science has a big role to play here by understanding the nature and role of markets in global society. Economists, neo-classical economists, often begin with: “Let’s assume there’s a market, and let’s assume that people enter it with these characteristics.” But markets don’t exist as a state of nature; markets are human constructions, social creations. Markets are created through institutional arrangements, through cultural practices, through social institutions.

Markets that we know today are really the product of the last couple hundred years. For most of human history and pre-history, human beings interacted and exchanged things outside of markets. Markets are something that we’ve built, and we’ve built them because they’ve proved to be fairly effective ways of generating wealth and distributing goods and services. The question is, what is a market?

A market is basically people competing according to a set of rules, and the rules are defined by a state. You can’t have a market without a state, because a state defines the rules of competition, what rights people have in markets, and how the markets function. They do this by specifying contracts and rules and property law, but they also do it by building infrastructure, both social infrastructure and physical infrastructure.

We live in a democratic society, and I believe markets should be democratically constructed. People should have information about how markets are performing, regular feedback on the outcomes, and if they don’t like the outcomes they should be able to change the rules so that the markets perform differently. It’s just like in a basketball game. If you have a three point rule or if you don’t have a three point rule, there’s still competition, but the rules change and affect the outcomes.

The global market has been built by a very narrow set of players: people who represent financial interests and corporate interests, international wealth, basically. Labor hasn’t been at the table. Consumers haven’t been at the table, and citizens haven’t been at the table.

We don’t exist as citizens of democratic society to serve markets; markets serve us. We construct them because they do things for us. If we don’t like what they’re doing for us, we can modify the rules of competition and change the infrastructure to have different outcomes. We saw this in the New Deal. Franklin Roosevelt passed a series of pieces of legislation that gave relatively more power to citizens, relatively more power to labor, and the rules of competition were changed. It led to a very different set of outcomes. That has all been undone since 1975 at the national level, and it’s never been done at the global level with the successive rounds of general agreements on tariffs and trade and the formation of the World Trade Organization.

So what we need to do if we’re going to simultaneously create wealth and get a reasonably equitable distribution—not an equal distribution, but a much more equitable distribution than we’ve got now— is get other important elements in society to the table.

If I were running for president, that would be my policy right now.

LSU Research: How effective are social scientists at translating their research findings into terms the general public can understand?

MASSEY: They’re pitiful.

A lot of social scientists seem to think that by saying things in a more complicated and convoluted way, they somehow demonstrate they’re smarter than everybody else. I think that if you can’t explain something to a regular person, you probably don’t know what you’re talking about. Things can be very complicated, but the job of a public intellectual, who is a social scientist but also trying to speak to the general public, is to explain these complicated ideas in terms that people can understand.

Social scientists, particularly sociologists, [have] really lost the high ground. Economists have held the high ground for the past twenty years because they have a very simple story, a simple model, and they can communicate pretty easily. I think sociologists should pay more attention to what the economists have done in the past twenty to thirty years and try to reach a broader audience. Milton Friedman wrote books for the masses, and I think sociologists should do that too. I don’t think it should be penalized in the academy; I think you should get some points for it. That’s what I was trying to do when I wrote Return of the “L” Word, which is my treatise on liberalism in the United States and what it means. That’s what I’m trying to do when I write op-ed pieces in the New York Times, when I go on CNN, when I talk to Katie Couric.

ON THE WEB:

The Higher the Wall, The Less It Works
http://sociology.princeton.edu/Faculty/Massey/

from Autumn 2007 Issue