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Meaningful measures of human society in the twenty-first century

Nature volume 595, pages 189–196 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Science rarely proceeds beyond what scientists can observe and measure, and sometimes what can be observed proceeds far ahead of scientific understanding. The twenty-first century offers such a moment in the study of human societies. A vastly larger share of behaviours is observed today than would have been imaginable at the close of the twentieth century. Our interpersonal communication, our movements and many of our everyday actions, are all potentially accessible for scientific research; sometimes through purposive instrumentation for scientific objectives (for example, satellite imagery), but far more often these objectives are, literally, an afterthought (for example, Twitter data streams). Here we evaluate the potential of this massive instrumentation—the creation of techniques for the structured representation and quantification—of human behaviour through the lens of scientific measurement and its principles. In particular, we focus on the question of how we extract scientific meaning from data that often were not created for such purposes. These data present conceptual, computational and ethical challenges that require a rejuvenation of our scientific theories to keep up with the rapidly changing social realities and our capacities to capture them. We require, in other words, new approaches to manage, use and analyse data.

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Fig. 1: Measurement in social science.

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Acknowledgements

D.L. acknowledges support from the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation. E.H. acknowledges support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    David Lazer & Jason Radford

  2. Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    David Lazer

  3. Department of Communication and Media Research, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Eszter Hargittai

  4. Hussman School of Journalism and Media, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Deen Freelon

  5. Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon

  6. Department of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA

    Kevin Munger

  7. School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

    Katherine Ognyanova

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Lazer, D., Hargittai, E., Freelon, D. et al. Meaningful measures of human society in the twenty-first century. Nature 595, 189–196 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03660-7

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