2024 SSD Diploma and Hooding Ceremony

Dean Pollock thank you very much for that warm introduction and Dean Woodward thank you very much for the invitation to speak to our graduates, their friends and their families.

First off, graduates, congratulations on accomplishing something very challenging and rewarding. Obtaining at graduate degree from the University of Chicago’s Social Science Division is no small endeavor.  It is intellectually demanding, stressful, and also enlightening. You survived and thrived at a place, who is proud of a mantra that says: “Where fun goes to die.” Please take a moment to soak it in, in this beautiful venue. 

A colleague of mine from another institution once quipped to me that UChicago is the “MIT of the social sciences.”  Maybe MIT is the UChicago of Engineering and Technology.  Either way your degree comes from one of the preeminent institutions in world, particularly in the Social Sciences.

Why is the University of Chicago so renowned in the social sciences? It is because, in many ways, the University of Chicago has defined social science fields. We have the Chicago Schools of Economics, Sociology and Political Science, and all of the Social Science Division departments are ranked in the top ten of U.S. News and World Reports except for one.  You may be asking yourself, which one is not ranked in the top ten?  That would be my home department the Department of Psychology.  We are close, we are ranked #12. My colleagues and I know we need to pick it up and we will. We strive to be the top Psychology Department in the world.  Dean Woodward, we will not let you down, I promise.

All kidding aside, I was wondering what is going to be the next Chicago School of the Social Sciences? Or if we were going to have a new Chicago School of the Social Sciences what would it look like and how will you, graduates, be a part of it?  I’d like to take a few minutes to brainstorm what this might look like with you.

One of my advisor’s in graduate school, Steve Kaplan, used to tell me when you are unsure of what to do with your life try to find the intersection of: what you are good at, what you like and what the world needs.

From my vantage point there are 3 elements that I think would be really interesting to see as the next Chicago School of the Social Sciences. #1) What the world needs: Social Science solving problems, #2) What are we good at: Interdisciplinary science, and #3) what do we like: theory and complexity.

First off, what the world needs. I think the world needs more application of social science research to design interventions that change society.  Already I have just said a bad word.  I said the “A” word “applied.”  This is such a theoretically driven place.  A school that had no engineering school (until recently), no architecture school and no urban planning.  We are not going to build anything here! 

Of course we do build things, we build knowledge. But I am a trained engineer, and I would like to challenge us to build more than knowledge. 

People often say that the social sciences are good at identifying problems, but not solving them. I think we should take this up as a challenge and to try to apply our science in ways that improve the world. The world needs social scientists to help to improve how we are functioning individually and collectively and to not let other fields and big companies to dominate the design of the world. 

I was taken by something that our colleague from Philosophy Candace Vogler told me at a conference. She was talking about places and spaces and how “the Durham Chapel at Duke University is so beautiful it does the praying for you.”  I think we are in a similar kind of venue, and that idea has resonated with me. 

In my work, we think a lot about the bidirectional relationships between our brains and the environment.  Our brains designed much of the built environment and that environment affects our brains and our subsequent behavior. Imagine if we could design schools that did the learning for us, or workplaces that did the work for us.  Can we design cities that make people less biased and more cooperative?  Can we alter people’s movements in ways that increase the flow of information and the speed innovation?  We have some ideas for how to do this by increasing the amount natural elements in cities (e.g., parks, trees, and greenspaces), mimicking the patterns of nature in built structures (called biophilic design), adding public transport strategically to remove invisible walls between neighborhoods and removing some roads and automobile traffic.

Many people don’t like the term social engineering.  My sister has told me before don’t use that term and I get it. It can sound very draconian and dystopian, but I like some elements of it. I would encourage you to think about how your social science work could be used to build new technology and new physical structures that improve well-being. 

Second, what are we are good at? We are really good at combining fields, being interdisciplinary and using different methodologies. In his Foundation book series, Isaac Asimov invented a field called psychohistory whose practitioners were psychohistorians.  It was a field that combined mathematics, sociology and history in order to develop mathematical models that would predict the behavior of large groups of people. I really love that idea.  It is very interesting to me that our Social Science Division has the History department in it and that so many researchers use different methods in their work. Researchers across the division use quantitative, qualitative, ethnographic, and interpretative methodologies and we even have researchers who study behavior in non-human animals. You can find many researchers here using a mixture of methods to tackle interesting social science questions. 

I also think about Herbert Simon, who got his bachelors and Ph.D. at U. Chicago in Political Science in the 1930s and 40s. I always thought of Herbert Simon as a psychologist and computer scientist (not a political scientist), and he won a Nobel prize in Economics. He is the first Political Scientist to have won a Nobel. I think our ability to work across disciplines and to use different methodologies is something that we want to increase in our new Chicago School of the Social Sciences.

Third, what do we love? We love theory and complexity. 

Another U. Chicago mantra is: “that is all well and good in practice, but how will it work in theory?” We pride ourselves on theory.

Sometimes I get a little jealous of physics and their unifying theories and elegant formulas.  They can summarize so much complexity with such precision.

I remember watching the great U. Chicago physicist Eugene Parker, who proposed solar wind, on the CBS show Sunday morning.  The interviewer was asking Dr. Parker about his work and all the complexity of it. Towards the end of the interview, the interviewer asked Dr. Parker if the Cubs would win the world series. Dr. Parker didn’t flinch and said something along the lines of “oh that would be impossible because that is so complicated. What the pitcher ate for breakfast may matter.” This was heartening to me. Dr. Parker understood that when it comes to behavior and in particular human behavior there is so much complexity. 

We work in a very complex space.  Maybe the most complex space. 

But this shouldn’t be scary, this should be exciting.  There is so much to learn and to know.

Herbert Simon’s student and long-time collaborator Allan Newell advocated for unified theories of cognition.   Chemistry has the periodic table of elements, biology has DNA and Darwinian Evolution, Physics has general relativity and the standard model of particle physics. Newell advocated that for the social sciences to take the next big jump, we likely need some unifying theories. 

Some of you are already trying to do this.  My collaborators and my lab are also trying to do some of this. For example, do neurons in brains connect and interact like people in cities?  When we perceive the fractal patterns in nature, does that push the brain into more fractal states that reflect some kind of rest or relaxation? When brains are working harder are they less fractal no matter what the task is?  When we try to do this, we are often wrong, which my students are very fast to tell me. But we are likely going to get a lot wrong before we start to get things right. 

The great social psychologist Kurt Lewin had a saying “that there is nothing more applied than a good theory.”  When we have great theories of behavior, we should be able to apply those theories in ways that will improve society.  I think that should also help us at UChicago to not see application as such a bad word, because great theories can have great application value, and I would add that when trying to apply our theories in the real world, they will often break and need to be updated and improved.  We can learn from application to improve theory.

Graduates, you are the next UChicago School of the Social Sciences. Take pride in that, and please continue to push the boundaries. Congratulations on all of your accomplishments and best of luck on your future endeavors. The world needs you!