Perpetuating Racism in the Ivory: Well-Meaning Whiteness in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Although there has been a recent increased awareness of the lack of support to Black scholars in academia, initiatives and action plans to address such inequity are severely lacking. Lack of support from individuals and institutions contributes to such disparities for Black scholars, stifling growth and discovery in social and behavioral research. This flaw is due to the lack of diverse representation in the research and the academic workforce. We must acknowledge the role of anti-Black racism in science and how our fellow Black scientists are negatively affected, including the impact on their careers, work-life harmony, and overall mental wellness. We address the multifaceted effects of anti-Black racism throughout the Ivory on Black scholars, academic spaces, and the field of social and behavioral sciences in general. Finally, we offer concrete recommendations to be implemented immediately and, over time, by individual White scholars and academic institutions at large.

A collaborative clinical case conference model for teaching social and behavioral science in medicine: an action research study

Background Effective social and behavioral sciences teaching in medical education requires integration with clinical experience, as well as collaboration between social and behavioral sciences experts and clinical faculty. However, teaching models for achieving this integration have not been adequately established, nor has the collaboration process been described. This study aims to propose a collaborative clinical case conference model to integrate social and behavioral sciences and clinical experience. Additionally, we describe how social and behavioral science experts and clinical faculty collaborate during the development of the teaching method. Methods A team of medical teachers and medical anthropologists planned for the development of a case conference based on action research methodology. The initial model was planned for a 3-h session, similar to a Clinicopathological Conference (CPC) structure. We evaluated each session based on field notes taken by medical anthropologists and post-session questionnaires that surveyed participants’ reactions and points of improvement. Based on the evaluation, a reflective meeting was held to discuss revisions for the next trial. We incorporated the development process into undergraduate medical curricula in clinical years and in a postgraduate and continuous professional development session for residents and certified family physicians in Japan. We repeated the plan-act-observe-reflection process more than 15 times between 2015 and 2018. Results The development of the collaborative clinical case conference model is summarized in three phases: Quasi-CPC, Interactive, and Co-constructive with unique structures and underlying paradigms. The model successfully contributed to promoting the participants’ recognition of the clinical significance of social and behavioral sciences. The case preparation entailed unique and significant learning of how social and behavioral sciences inform clinical practice. The model development process promoted the mutual understanding between clinical faculty and anthropologists, which might function as faculty development for teachers involved in social and behavioral sciences teaching in medical education. Conclusions The application of appropriate conference models and awareness of their underlying paradigms according to educational situations promotes the integration of social and behavioral sciences with clinical medicine education. Faculty development regarding social and behavioral sciences in medical education should focus on collaboration with scholars with different paradigmatic orientations.

New functionalism and the social and behavioral sciences

Functionalism about kinds is still the dominant style of thought in the special sciences, like economics, psychology, and biology. Generally construed, functionalism is the view that states or processes can be individuated based on what role they play rather than what they are constituted of or realized by. Recently, Weiskopf (2011a, 2011b) has posited a reformulation of functionalism on the model-based approach to explanation. We refer to this reformulation as ‘new functionalism’. In this paper, we seek to defend new functionalism and to recast it in light of the concrete explanatory aims of the special sciences. In particular, we argue that the assessment of the explanatory legitimacy of a functional kind needs to take into account the explanatory purpose of the model in which the functional kind is employed. We aim at demonstrating this by appealing to model-based explanations from the social and behavioral sciences. Specifically, we focus on preferences and signals as functional kinds. Our argument is intended to have the double impact of deflecting criticisms against new functionalism from the perspective of mechanistic decomposition while also expanding the scope of new functionalism to encompass the social and behavioral sciences.

Data Management Plan for Participatory Technology Assessment and Cultures of Expertise in the U.S. Federal Government

Data management plan for NSF Social and Behavioral Sciences Directorate (SBE) Science & Technology Studies (STS) Program proposal

NIMH Roundtable Discussion - Promissory Notes and Prevailing Norms in Social and Behavioral Sciences Research (1997)

Most workshops convened by the National Institute's of Health are devoted to the puzzle-solving activities of normal science,where the puzzles themselves and the strategies available for solving them are determined largely in advance by the sharedparadigmatic assumptions, frameworks, and priorities of the scientific community's research paradigm. They are designed tofacilitate what Thomas Kuhn referred to as elucidating topological detail within a map whose main outlines are available inadvance. And apparently for good reason. Historical studies by Kuhn and others reveal that science moves fastest and penetratesmost deeply when its practitioners work within well-defined and deeply ingrained traditions and employ the concepts, theories,methods, and tools of a shared paradigm. No paradigm is perfect and none is capable of identifying, let alone solving, all of theproblems relevant to a given domain of inquiry. Thus, the essential day-to-day business of normal science is not to question thelimits or adequacy of a given paradigm, but rather to exploit the presumed virtues for which it was adopted. As Kuhn cautioned inhis discussion of paradigms, re-tooling, in science as in manufacture, as an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion thatdemands it.

When the Going Gets Tough, How Do We Perceive the Future?

People struggle to stay motivated to work toward difficult goals. Sometimes the feeling of difficulty signals that the goal is important and worth pursuing; other times, it signals that the goal is impossible and should be abandoned. In this article, we argue that how difficulty is experienced depends on how we perceive and experience the timing of difficult events. We synthesize research from across the social and behavioral sciences and propose a new, integrated model to explain how components of time perception interact with interpretations of experienced difficulty to influence motivation and goal-directed behavior. Although these constructs have been studied separately in previous research, we suggest that these factors are inseparable and that an integrated model will help us to better understand motivation and predict behavior. We conclude with new empirical questions to guide future research and by discussing the implications of this research for both theory and intervention practice.

The Challenge of Measuring Well-Being as Philosophers Conceive of It

Many philosophers find the prospect of working with researchers in the social and behavioral sciences exciting, in part because they hope that these researchers might be able to measure well-being as the philosopher conceives of it. In this chapter, the author considers how the measurement of well-being, as it is conceived of by philosophers, might be facilitated. She proposes that existing scales can be employed for this purpose, and she supports this conclusion through an in-depth discussion of an example. The author explains how a scale of psychological well-being validated in more than 750 empirical studies may be employed to measure the extent to which a person has realized an ostensible basic good. This discussion is illustrative of the general method that may be employed to bring empirical researchers and philosophers into contact in a way that will facilitate the measurement of well-being as philosophers conceive of it.

Message from the Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Education and Science, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2021

Dear readers and authors, It is a great honor for us to publish the International Journal of Education and Science (IJES) for the fourth year in a row. There were some organizational and technical changes at the beginning of 2021, of which we would like to inform the readers and authors of the IJES. Changes in the IJES co-founders composition. The co-founders composition changed in March 2021: Information Agency PROK, Latvian Republic – Ukraine and Melnyk Yuriy Borysovych, Ukraine were replaced by a new co-founder Kud Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, Ukraine. Re-registration is taking place in the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine. Expansion and specification of scientific directions of the IJES. Today’s realities required combination and specification of scientific directions in the field of social and behavioral sciences the IJES is dedicated to. Such scientific directions as Social and Behavioral Sciences: Education, Economics, and Law were specified to ensure further more in-depth professional specialization of the IJES. Thus, the IJES remains a scientific periodical peer-reviewed indexed journal providing a scientific platform for presenting and discussing new trends and problems in the social and behavioral sciences. For the previous three years, the IJES was published only in two languages (English and Ukrainian). In 2021, the Editorial Council decided to publish the IJES in three languages, namely in English, Ukrainian and Russian. Changes in the format of scientific papers in the IJES. Due to the change in the number of languages in which the IJES will be published, as well as new trends, including regarding the references format (APA Style (APA 7th)), the requirements for paper format have been changed. You can read about the changes both in the online version on the IJES website and in the printed version at the end of the last issue.

Finding Purpose in the Conservation of Biodiversity by the Commingling of Science and Ethics

Averting the biodiversity crisis requires closing a gap between how humans tend to behave, individually and collectively, and how we ought to behave—“ought to” in the sense of behaviors required to avert the biodiversity crisis. Closing that gap requires synthesizing insight from ethics with insights from social and behavioral sciences. This article contributes to that synthesis, which presents in several provocative hypotheses: (i) Lessening the biodiversity crisis requires promoting pro-conservation behavior among humans. Doing so requires better scientific understanding of how one’s sense of purpose in life affects conservation-relevant behaviors. Psychology and virtue-focused ethics indicate that behavior is importantly influenced by one’s purpose. However, conservation psychology has neglected inquiries on (a) the influence of one’s purpose (both the content and strength of one’s purpose) on conservation-related behaviors and (b) how to foster pro-conservation purposes; (ii) lessening the biodiversity crisis requires governance—the regulation of behavior by governments, markets or other organization through various means, including laws, norms, and power—to explicitly take conservation as one of its fundamental purposes and to do so across scales of human behaviors, from local communities to nations and corporations; (iii) lessening the biodiversity crisis requires intervention via governance to nudge human behavior in line with the purpose of conservation without undue infringement on other basic values. Aligning human behavior with conservation is inhibited by the underlying purpose of conservation being underspecified. Adequate specification of conservation’s purpose will require additional interdisciplinary research involving insights from ethics, social and behavioral sciences, and conservation biology.