Dr. SIMON. Well, since I have spent most of my own professional life in interdisciplinary space, I would, of course, welcome any funding of such research. Generally, I would welcome a greater emphasis on studies that draw knowledge from more than one of the social sciences when that knowledge is relevant. But I think we are all aware, also, that the National Science Foundation, in the social sciences as in its other activities, can only to a limited extent be an opinion leader. It can't support science unless there are absolutely first-rate scientists who want to do that kind of science.

To the best of my knowledge, the National Science Foundation is and has been rather sensitive to the values of interdisciplinary research, but the opportunity to support such research must depend on the progress of attitudes within the sciences, themselves. That is, unless we convert a body of first-rate economists to the belief that there needs to be some empirical, psychological research as a part of economic research, then, there will be nobody for the Foundation to support. We in the sciences have to set our houses in order if we are to enable the Foundation to do that.

That doesn't mean that the Foundation has to be passive. I think it can look for trends in the sciences and try to be among the foremost. I thing it sometimes can encourage and has encouraged scientists to get together for the purpose of looking forward in their own sciences and looking for new directions.

Dr. BROWN. I have a rather striking quotation which I would like to enjoy with you, from an economist.

The whole economic profession, indeed, is an example of that monumental misallocation of interlegislational resources which is one of the most striking phenomena of our time. Far from being in a mood of self-congratulation, we should be in a mood of repentance. We are still like Newton, only a boy playing on the seashore, and a great ocean of food still lies undiscovered before us. That undiscovered ocean is man, himself.

I don't suppose you would quarrel with that, too much.

Dr. SIMON. No; although I think the opening sentences may be a little harsh. It shows some lack of charity. Economics, about the time I finished my education, was getting very excited about having found some sharp and powerful new mathematical tools, and it has been working with those tools and sometimes has become fascinated with them, and they have contributed mightily to the progress of that science in the last generation.

But, I think we have perhaps reached a time-and that quotation expresses the same sentiment-we have reached a time when we probably want to blend those tools with a little more attention to what the world is like out there.

Mr. BROWN. Well, that is the point of my question.

Is the Foundation, in its desire to improve tools, losing sight of the broader function which we need to get the cognizance of here. After all, although Adam invented the concept of economic man as an entity convenient for developing these theories, I think he knew the weaknesses better than most of the people who think they are economists today.

Dr. SIMON. If I wanted to fault someone here, it would not be the Foundation. It would be the economics profession. I cannot honestly say from my knowledge of the NSF's economics program-I had, a couple of years ago an opportunity to examine it while chairing the

committee that reviewed the NSF behavioral science programs—I can't say that the NSF has been turning down good proposals for economic research. Certainly the economics program has had a primary focus on the tool builders and the sharp tool users, but that is synonymous with the best economists of the recent and current generations. I think the reform has to begin in the American Economics Association before it can move very far in the National Science Foundation.

Mr. BROWN. Well, that is one of the examples where you are damned if you do and you are damned if you don't. That is unfortunate. They have a lot of situations like that.

Mr. Harkins, if at any point you feel you would like to ask some questions, I don't have any further.

Mr. Scoville?

Mr. SCOVILLE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just have one brief question.

Dr. Simon, you mentioned some interesting work on the relationship between the way an expert and novices tackle problems. My question is, would there be an attempt to try to understand how the research process takes place and, in general, does this research show us any insight into the process by which sometimes relative novices, in a field, come and make very fundamental changes by potentially exposing the weaknesses of the underlying hypotheses? It would seem to me there is enormous potential for understanding the creative process by, basically, stimulating innovation. I am just curious as to how you feel with respect to this?

Dr. SIMON. There is a good deal of research going on now in cognitive science on the innovative process. There is also some excellent research going on in economics on the adoption of innovations. But, referring to the cognitive science research, there are already several computer programs that, in a very modest way, simulate processes that one would have to call creative. That is, the computer discovers all sorts of new things it didn't know, in a way that mimics human creativity. We even have one such program in our shop, which was able to take some raw data and discover regularities in them. We are using that kind of computer simulation as one of many tools to explore what creativity is all about, how it is that a system can search through large spaces and move into new territory.

I don't think, although that question is obviously on the agenda, this research has touched much yet on the specific question you raised, that is, what are the circumstances under which someone moving laterally from another field can suddenly throw light on a problem which a discipline, itself, has been unable to tackle or to solve satisfactorily. That is an important phenomenon. I don't think anyone has directed the kind of research that I am describing at that particular phenomenon.

Mr. SCOVILLE. Thank you.

Mr. BROWN. Dr. Simon, I want to show my deep appreciation to you for being here and for the very stimulative remarks that you have made.

I think the exercise, this morning, has given us a much clearer picture of the importance of the role of the Foundation, particularly in the area of social and behavioral sciences, and we are grateful to all of the witnesses who have appeared. Thank you.

Dr. SIMON. Thank you.

Mr. BROWN. The subcommittee will be adjourned until 2 p.m.

AFTERNOON SESSION

Mr. BROWN. The committee will come to order.

This afternoon is the last of a number of sessions devoted to the fiscal year 1981 authorization for the National Science Foundation. We are focusing today on those programs within the Behavioral and Social Science Directorate, not for the purpose of picking them out for unfavorable comparison, but hopefully in order to clarify our understanding and strengthen our defense of these programs.

We have this afternoon a distinguished panel of social scientists from the social science community, not a part of the National Science Foundation. We look forward to varied testimony and observations with regard to the role of the National Science Foundation. I trust that their discussions will illuminate not only the value of the programs, but any areas in which it may be possible to provide direction and strength that would help in the continual battle for support of science in the Congress.

The first witnesses will be a panel of three persons, Dr. Judith Rodin from Yale University, Dr. Harlan Lane from Northeastern University and Dr. Reynolds Farley from the University of Michigan. If they would care to come up at this time, I would be glad to have them. STATEMENT OF PANEL CONSISTING OF DR. JUDITH RODIN, DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY, YALE UNIVERSITY; DR. HARLAN LANE, DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY, NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY; AND DR. REYNOLDS FARLEY, POPULATION STUDY CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Mr. BROWN. Dr Rodin, would you like to start and give us the benefit of your observations?

Dr. RODIN. Thank you, Mr. Brown, and members of the committee. I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today. I am delighted to do so because it is my belief that we stand at the threshold of an era where the burdens of modern society can in large part be attributed to problems of behavior.

Medical research will continue to seek cures for many diseases, but we need to learn ways to reeducate the public to engage in behavior that will promote their health and prevent disease. Overeating, alcohol, cigarette and drug consumption, lack of exercise, failure to drive carefully or to use seatbelts-all are essentially problems of behavior and they can be life-threatening.

In other areas of modern crisis, social and behavioral factors loom, equally large. Our energy problems are exacerbated by overconsumption. Technologies for changing energy-using habits and fostering conservation attitudes must be stressed alongside research and development of new sources of energy.

The solution for social ills such as overcrowding, poverty, and crime rely heavily on the scientific study of human behavior rather than on physics or chemistry.

Airline crashes and nuclear mishaps are as often the consequence of human error as of specific equipment failure. Perhaps only when technology is sufficiently advanced to eliminate the need for human decisionmaking will the study of psychology no longer be important to these areas.

I think the list could go and on and while highlighting these areas may make it seem almost arbsurdly obvious to all of us that social and behavioral factors do play a significant role in the major problems that face us today, the enormous strides that research in these areas has taken may be far less evident.

This is unfortunate for those of us who wish to reflect on the unique importance of the social and behavioral sciences, but it is hardly surprising, for we work in an arena in which there are really patentable discoveries, often no objects or three-dimensional outcomes.

Our commodity is ideas, often intangible ones. Our science contributes to the domain of general knowledge being drawn upon by educators, the medical and legal community, political influencers and the media.

Perhaps the areas in which we work seem less important because they are so close to our own personal experience. To most of us, the thought of discovering how to put a man on the moon is exquisite and mysterious. By contrast, discovering the factors that determine how people like or influence one another may seem frightfully mundane. Since many of our world problems are affected by interpersonal communication and influence, the latter topic may be far less catchy but far more important.

Just as our colleagues in the physical sciences, most of us are involved in the process of the acquisition of knowledge, whether it be basic or applied. We study human behavior from the level of neural processing up through the level of human groups and cultures.

Most of us are not the problem solvers. While we do not apply the knowledge, we recognize that it is essential for the advancement of science and the solution of social problems to maintain effective communication between the scientists and the problem solvers, and some of our basic research activities are directed to this end.

Perhaps we are worthy of blame in not writing the abstracts of our grant proposals in a language that conveys our science in the best light. But I hope the solution will not be to cut off the research, but to demand that we become more accountable and do a better job of selfpresentation. I'd like to try a little of that for you today.

Throughout the recent history of psychology we have been studying problems of vital concern, developing basic knowledge that has paid off, often being applied to areas unthought of when the initial research began.

For example, social psychologists became interested in how information, especially events involving people, was processed by the brain, how it was stored in memory and how it was retrieved. This was an intriguing question since we sought to learn whether information processing was the same for letters or numbers as for people, who arouse feelings in us, to name only one obvious difference.

The answer is that the processes are remarkably similar, and thus a whole body of cognitive psyhcology and computer technology becomes applicable to understanding how humans encode and remember the things that one another do.

From this we learned not only that eyewitness accounts are extremely vulnerable, but we now understand the specific mechanism by which they are influenced and how memory can change even by the way the question is asked.

In one study, people were shown films of auto accidents and they then answered questions about events in the films. Asking the question. "How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?" elicited a much higher estimate of speed than when the words hit or collided were used in place of smashed.

But even more significant, a week later, the people who had been given the verb smashed were more likely to answer yes to the question, "Did you see any broken glass?" even though broken glass was not present in the film.

Early studies of the processes of attention, many originally undertaken to determine how the circuitry of the brain was operating, eventually solved the problems faced by air traffic controllers who often had to respond to several messages all coming in at the same time. Literally hundreds of lives may have been saved because of this work. Sometimes basic research in psychology is actually suggested by real-world problems and here the evidence of value is easier to find. Newspaper accounts of apathetic bystander behavior even when no danger is involved led to important research into its causes. Riots and mob violence have received similar systematic investigation and today I am aware of several major police departments using the results of these studies in their training.

Another basic research issue confronted by social psychologists in the last decade is the question of the explanation that people give for feelings of unexplained arousal, physical symptoms and even events in their environment. Studies have shown that the labels people provide for these feelings states in fact determine their effects.

What is surprising is just how malleable these labels actually are. It has even been shown that if I take a drug whose side effects are to lead to the arousal of emotion and I am unaware that these feelings are being caused by the drug, I may attribute them to other things going on in my life, for example, how my husband is treating me, and then I would overreact for the wrong reasons.

Very recently, the FDA, in becoming aware of this research, sought to require written warnings of the psychological as well as the physical side effects of drugs.

In my own work, we are now at a point where we, too, have a chance to make an important contribution to an area of major concern. But our earliest work did not even hint at this end and I wonder whether close observation of my first abstract would have withstood the scrutiny of the negativism of the current climate in the lay community.

In those first studies, to investigate differences in the eating behavior of overweight and normal weight people, we varied whether experimental participants were offered shelled or unshelled walnuts or drank milkshakes from containers that either did or did not reveal how much had been drunk.

These manipulations were intended to see whether overweight people relied more than normal weight people on cues in the environment than on internal phsysiological signals to determine how much they ate. We've come a long way since these early studies. Our work can now