“The imperative to make exaggerated promises about impact is damaging to the science itself”

Second, and this is an issue which I’ve been recently arguing myself, is that if you take something like the understanding of the human brain, it’s impossible to understand it unless you recognise that the brain is embodied, and unless you recognize that the embodied brain is intrinsically, not just extrinsically, enmeshed in its social and cultural and experiential world – and that’s not just an add on. It seems to me that that is crucial in the understanding of how brains, in particular, human brains, develop, how their capacities are shaped, how they are modulated both across the life course, and at any one time. My argument would be that we need to get the social sciences engaged, firstly in setting the very research agenda, and the forming of the research problem, and secondly, in the actual scientific work that’s going on here. This is not a wish for the social sciences to get just a portion of the money, but it is a very real argument that unless you understand the social embeddedness of neurobiological processes, and of biological processes more generally, you simply won’t understand the phenomena that you’re trying to explain.

via Five minutes with Nikolas Rose: “The imperative to make exaggerated promises about impact is damaging to the science itself” | Impact of Social Sciences.