My problem with popular social science

Inside academia (or at least in the field of sociology), scholars like to emphasize that they are producing works that speak to a broad audience, address pressing social issues, and engage people. This all sounds great, right? Who wouldn't want public-funded research to be accessible to the public? Wouldn't it be elitist and undemocratic to lock up research away from the public?

The problem with people producing popular social science works (think Freakonomics, Why Nations Fail, Evicted, The Vivaldi Effect, Thinking fast and slow) is that they create a bunch of overconfident readers. As someone who's in social science and reads a lot of popular social science, I often notice that what's "popular" about social science is usually the act of phrasing complex arguments in readable sentences. A crude way to put it is that you're essentially making alcohol "children friendly" by adding orange juice.

The popular audience is not mentally prepared to take in the full detail embedded in the re-phrased-but-still-complex sentences. What they take in isn't the minute details about statistical significance and variable interaction, but a "gist" of the argument. The gist of an argument may sound something like this: Hey, some researcher from Stanford thinks that political polarization is caused by using social media, so let's do media detox to save our country.

There's little room for the untrained mind to include flaws and biases based on methodological assumptions, textured and layered discussions and implications in the sentence above. The researcher may be careful, but the popular audience certainly is not. Researchers, as producers of knowledge, is fine-tuned to the intricacies of research, while the public, as consumers of knowledge, care mostly about its utility, and may misinterpret findings to support what they like to hear. Worse of all, they will develop a confidence based on what they consider to be merely "facts and logic".

I'm not the only one who thinks this. Many media who do popular social science is noticing this too. Fivethirtyeight, for example, devotes more and more of their articles teaching statistics rather than using it. Many journalists are also picking up on this, often adding more and more jargon-filled statistical disclaimers in their reporting.

Before calling me an elitist, let me just point out that this exists in medicine as well. People often misinterpret medical research to support their own lifestyle, or in other cases dramatically change their lifestyle, resulting in wasteful spendings and sometimes even worsened health. Giving the untrained mind too much cool toys to play with can be dangerous. This isn't to say that no one should ever write for the public anymore, however. It is just that any kind of authority figure addressing the popular audience should think about this dimension of things before they speak.