PCAST Releases Report on the Value of Social Sciences in Improving American Lives

Today, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released a report to build upon the incredible progress that the Biden-Harris Administration has made to harness the insights of social and behavioral science (SBS) to benefit the American public.

Social science helps us understand the cultural, societal, political, economic, and psychological processes that shape human behavior and decision-making. These insights are invaluable to ensuring policies enhance Americans’ health, wealth, and economic opportunities, among many other outcomes.

This report highlights the use of social science for the benefit of the American public and makes recommendations to continue to improve social science research and its use in policymaking. It builds on the work of the Biden-Harris Administration to harness the insights of social science through the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 and the Blueprint for the Use of Social and Behavioral Science to Advance Evidence-Based Policymaking. The report identifies specific barriers to the effective integration of social and behavioral science in policymaking and offers recommendations to reduce them. It also offers recommendations to position the federal government to be more responsive to, and increase its ability to leverage, the rapidly changing social science research ecosystem. This particularly includes the emergence of private technology companies that collect and own large swaths of data regarding human behavior and produce products that significantly impact American lives.

PCAST provides recommendations to:

• Optimize the presence and integration of social and behavioral scientists at federal agencies to better harness social scientific expertise, insights, and methods that support evidence-based policymaking, implementation, and evaluation.

• Expand secure access to federal data sets across agencies and with social scientists for approved research and policy evaluation needs with appropriate protections and safeguards.

• Review agency funding priorities, models, budgets, and instruments to better support the contemporary social and behavioral science research ecosystem.

• Facilitate engagement and partnerships between private industry, federal agencies, academic institutions, and not-for-profit foundations to harness social and behavioral science insights for greater policy impact on societal challenges.

To view a full copy of the PCAST report, please click here.

To view PCAST’s Letter to the President and the Executive Summary of the report, please click here.

PCAST is the sole body of advisors from outside the federal government charged with making science, technology, and innovation policy recommendations to the President. Learn more about their work here.

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