Former associate director and CASBS legend Robert A. Scott discusses the open-access compendium "Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences," a cross-referenced collection of hundreds of essays by leading scholars. We learn why Bob was uniquely positioned to shepherd the project. We also hear about his history with the Center, what makes interdisciplinary efforts succeed, and why volleyball is more than just volleyball.
Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences
Bob’s Introduction to the project
About the Robert A. Scott Lectureship Fund
The classic mud volleyball photo (click then scroll to the bottom of the article)
Human Centered episode featuring Richard Wrangham
CASBS in the History of Behavioral Economics
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.
Today on Human Centered, a conversation with beloved CASBS figure Robert A. Scott. Bob served twice as the center's associate director, first from 1983 to 2001, and again briefly for the 2009 year.
In 2016, in honor of his indelible imprint on the center, and in celebration of his 80th birthday, CASBS created the Robert A. Scott Lectureship Fund, which supports fellows participating in the center's public symposia. In retirement, Bob remained one of the center's biggest champions.
But now, he's back, uniting with CASBS once again with a project titled Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, a compendium of hundreds of cross-reference essays which explore a variety of interdisciplinary topics in a way that helps non-experts develop new ways of thinking and understanding social science. CASBS is hosting the project, and the best part is, it's free and open access to all. We'd love it if you'd dive in and explore the collection, along with Bob's terrific introductory essay, by visiting emergingtrends.stanford.edu.
We'll link to it and tons of bonus material in the episode notes. We'll hear about Bob's involvement with the project, its purpose, history, evolution and future. And of course, we'll hear about Bob's incredibly rich history with the Center.
From his first visit as a grad student in the late 1950s to the legendary volleyball matches with famed fellows, Bob helped make CASBS what it is. In many ways, his story is the Center's story. So sit back as our stellar CASBS communications director, Mike Gaetani, interviews the one and only Robert A. Scott.
Mike Gaetani: Bob, welcome to the podcast.
Bob Scott: Thank you.
Mike Gaetani: We're here to talk about Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. This is a labor of love for you. And it goes back to your days as associate director for CASBS, and we'll talk about that a little bit later, your history with the Center. Tell us what is Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, and then we'll try to unpack it and explore the story behind the story.
Bob Scott: It's a unique version of a reference work. The idea was one that was developed by then-director Stephen Coslin and myself. We were approached by Sage Foundation, a publication, to do a reference work.
And instead of doing a standard work, which we felt was just, there were already too many of them, what we were trying to do is create a platform where people who are knowledgeable about areas of expertise that they have mastered are able to write informatively about future directions of their fields. Each author was invited to answer three questions. One is, why is this topic worthy of further study?
Secondly, what do we know about it now? And thirdly, what do you think are the most promising lines of development going forward? And with that assignment, you needed to recruit a special kind of talent of people who are not only familiar with a field, but visionaries about it. And that was the idea behind it.
Mike Gaetani: And there have been a few iterations of Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. We can talk about its history and its genesis and evolution. It finds itself now at CASBIS. It's being hosted on CASBIS site. It's emergingtrends.stanford.edu, and we encourage people to explore it. It's comprised of now 465 essays written by experts across the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
But importantly, it encourages readers and users of this resource to explore themes, topics, issues in sort of broader interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary contexts. Can you talk about that a bit?
Bob Scott: Sure. Well, first, I want to say a word or two about the authors we tried to recruit because that's heavily rooted in past rosters of fellows of the Center. Since I had been here for 20 years, I knew a whole lot of former fellows and was able to identify in the first iteration of the work a good many of them to write the essays that were part of that first version.
We were then joined by Marlis Buckman, who is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Zurich and exceedingly well connected in social and behavioral science circles throughout the whole of Europe. And Marlis and I together organized three subsequent iterations of the work in which we added new topics, new authors, areas that hadn't been covered initially. The focus of the thing at the heart of it is an effort to be as interdisciplinary as possible.
The mechanism we developed for that was the use of hyperlinks where, since I was familiar with all 465 of the initial entries and then all of the subsequent ones, I was able to identify relevant topics applied to any single one entry that the reader might find interesting to know about. And so the idea was to create a smart reference work where they could learn things about a topic they didn't previously know, much less how to find out about it. And if they followed those hyperlinks, it would expand their command across disciplines.
Mike Gaetani: And that sort of captures the spirit and ethic of an ethos of what we do here at CASBS is encouraging people to think more broadly and to speak to audiences outside their own silos and disciplines. It's kind of fitting that it has ended up here, but it started out as a reference work that was published elsewhere. And how did it find its way here in 2022?
Bob Scott: Yeah, it found its way here for two reasons. One is the inaugural version and subsequent versions were issued by Wiley Publication. And what we discovered with Wiley is what we often discover when people talk about being interdisciplinary.
They talk a very good game but don't know how to do it. And that's frankly what we encountered with Wiley. Their acquisition editors, their marketing, their editorial staff, it's all siloed by discipline.
And this became a real obstacle to getting them to understand what it was we were trying to do. We worked very hard at that, but in the midst of it, the market for reference works of all kinds simply collapsed, not just with Wiley but across the board. And at that point, I thought we have to find a home for this that's the right home for it, but one where the intent of it is built into the DNA of the recipient host. And so that's how it ended up here.
Mike Gaetani: So it's sort of fortuitous that CASBS is a place that sort of understands innately what Emerging Trends is all about. So about a third of the authors are former CASBS fellows, and at one time at least there was an editorial board that was mostly CASBS.
Bob Scott: That's correct, yeah.
Mike Gaetani: And the editors-in-chief have shifted a little bit over time, but you've been the constant throughout. Talk about and give some acknowledgement, as you did to Marla Buckman already, and Steve Costlin. But how has it ended up where it is today with you?
Bob Scott: Well, two things happened. One is that Stephen resigned as director of the center in order to become head of the school he was helping to found in San Francisco, and that pretty well left it in my hands. He understood from the beginning that I would be the lead editor anyway, so I inherited it.
I relied very heavily on not just the editorial board of former fellows, but also the former fellows we were inviting to write essays, some of whom declined, but when that happened, I would turn to them and say, advise me about the best place to go, the best person to get to do this. And so they served as a source of recruitment as well. So even though a third of the entries are written by former fellows, the impact the center had on the whole content of the volume is much larger than that.
Mike Gaetani: And importantly, compared with the issue of accessibility maybe with previous publishers, here with CASBS hosting it, it's open access to all.
Bob Scott: It's open access, yes. And the marketing of this work by Wiley made it prohibitively expensive for libraries to acquire. And this was very frustrating because they simply never reached the sales figures that we had anticipated.
But now it's open and available and free to anyone. And that's wonderful because that's exactly what it is Stephen and I had in mind and Marlis and I had in mind when we worked on the initial version and subsequent iterations of it.
Mike Gaetani: And because it's open access, it's available not only for sort of CASBS caliber scholars, it's more broadly accessible and usable. Tell us about who its intended audiences are.
Bob Scott: Right, okay. Part of the instruction to the authors was to write for an audience that's not a specialist audience. And I spent, I can't tell you how much time working with them to get them to write it in a way that would make it accessible to an educated but not specialist audience.
The primary audiences are diverse. They're for graduate students looking for topics for dissertation research, but people who are practicing and established academics who are curious to know what's happening in fields that are adjacent to theirs or about which they've become curious and want to be brought up to speed on where they are. A lot of these entries are really excellent resources for them as well.
Mike Gaetani: Bob, you've written a terrific introduction essay to the whole compendium that really lays out emerging trends and helps guide people to exploring it. Why don't you unpack a little bit the linkages, the cross-referencing. Users don't have to go grasping for cross-disciplinary connections. It's kind of baked into it and into each essay within it. So just talk about that a little bit.
Bob Scott: So if you take a topic, for example, like globalization, there are a lot of entries about globalization. And let's say that one has been written by an economist on economic aspects of globalization. In reading that, if they look at the cross-references that we give, they will find entries about the treatment of this topic by political scientists, by sociologists, by anthropologists, by people from other disciplines, all of whom are dealing with this topic.
But when you read the entry, let's say, by an economist, it makes no mention of any of this work, and this is a way that the reader can kind of expand their grasp of the topic and how it's treated and what other disciplines, by other disciplines and what those disciplines know.
Mike Gaetani: You know, Emerging Trends has had a lifespan of 10 years and running. It's been a living, breathing compendium where essays were added. Some authors updated and refined their essays over time. Some disciplines a little bit more represented than others. Do you have hopes for Emerging Trends to continue to be a living, breathing compendium?
Bob Scott: Yes, it's designed to do that. If you look at me, you can see that I'm fast approaching my sell-by date. And what it is that I have been able to give to this project, I feel that I've given.
So we're open to invitations of inquiry from people who might be interested in taking it up and advancing it because it's designed to grow organically. It takes someone with a special kind of exposure to the social and behavioral sciences to do this. Most editors of handbooks and reference works have a very good command of a particular topic or area.
What's needed here is someone who has a command of the social and behavioral sciences enterprise very broadly defined. And it's hard to find such people. I was fortunate just because of my affiliation with the center that I was able to bring that to the topic, but it's hard to find such people. But if there are candidates out there, be in touch.
Mike Gaetani: And I believe on the Emerging Trends site, there is an email address where you're reachable. People can also contact the CASBS Communications Office to inquire more about the possible future of Emerging Trends and its leadership going forward. Why don't you say something about your wife, Julia, and her role in recent years?
Bob Scott: Yeah. Julia has been the force behind the scenes throughout this whole project. She keeps my life very well organized in ways that I'm not capable of doing.
And this project was so immense that she could see that it's not something I could be doing off the back of an envelope in my study at home. And so she stepped in repeatedly through the course of this and at the moment has been acting as the kind of managing director of it, helping me to shape it up, to get it in shape, to bring it here to the center, and has been involved in other ways. Going forward, if I were to get in, remain involved in this, whoever would like to try to recruit me had better give me money for divorce because Julia has made it very clear and I agree with her, okay, you've given this 10 years of your life enough already and I accept that.
Mike Gaetani: Okay, understood. We encourage interested listeners to actually play with it, explore it, dive into it and use its cross-referencing features and it's a knowledge resource for advancing our understanding on a bunch of different and interrelated topics. Bob, we want to talk about why you're uniquely suited to have shepherded this project for a dozen years or more.
There's hundreds of former CASBS fellows out there who know a lot of this, but listeners should know that Bob, you're sort of a beloved figure in the CASBS landscape. You're a legend actually. You bleed CASBS red.
You're one of our biggest champions and advocates and ambassadors. Tell us, I didn't even know this until this week, tell us your first associations with CASBS. You became associate director in 1983, but your history and connection with the Center goes way back before that. Tell us about that.
Bob Scott: Well, I did graduate work at Stanford in the sociology department. I got a Ph.D. It was in the late 1950s, and at that time Stanford didn't have any money for supporting graduate school students.
So they gave me an enticing scholarship to come here for the first year, and after that I was on my own. And the Center had just opened up. And so I and all my colleagues, fellow graduate students, worked up here.
Because they had money, this is going to cause problems for Woody Powell, who is the current director, but any fellow who wanted a research assistant could get one. And so all of us worked up here. And those were the amazing days, the early days of the Center.
I mean, the people who were fellows at that time, many of them were youngsters who were seen as the most promising comers in their fields. And I mean, people like Kenneth Arrow and Milton Friedman and Robert Solow and Thomas Kuhn, Gardner Lindsay, Robert Sears was around all the time. He was a trustee of the Center. Robert Merton was around. I mean, this was really an amazing environment.
And it became, and so as a research assistant, you just were around here all the time. I worked half time. And the fellows were very welcoming, very inclusive, very incorporating of anybody who was part of the community. And from that, I developed two things.
One is a view of the whole enterprise that I could not possibly have gotten anywhere else. No single department of sociology would ever have given me that. And the other is a deep appreciation for interdisciplinary work. I could see the value of it every day that I was here. So that got built into my career DNA, so to speak. And when I then went to, from here, I first was at Russell Sage Foundation in New York, but then went on to join the faculty at Princeton University.
And I loved that university. It came closer to the kind of environment I was looking for, but it didn't match the center because you could do cross-disciplinary work there, but all of the reward systems, evaluation systems, and so on were very carefully siloed in your discipline. And so it had a big impact on especially my teaching, where I was cross-teaching with people in history, with social psychology, public policy, and so on.
But it didn't match the center, and it was only when I was contacted by Gardner Lindsay, who was then the director in the early 1980s, inquiring about my possible interest in coming here that I jumped at the chance, because I knew this was the habitat I wanted to be in. And so that's how it came about.
Mike Gaetani: And this was the days where CASBS associate director was an academic. That changed somewhere along the line in the past 20 years or so.
Bob Scott: That's right. And that had to be the case for a simple reason. At the time, Gardner was the director, but then later Phil Converse, and then after that Neil Smelzer.
Their job was basically to raise money. And my job was to be the provost. And being the provost means you learn the word no in a big hurry.
And you had to have the street cred to make it stick. And so having academic credentials really benefited me in being able to do my job and retain reasonably cordial relations with people who aren't accustomed to being told no.
Mike Gaetani: So this place fit you like a glove. You were sort of a cross-disciplinary sociologist at Princeton. And then you came here and this was the place that you dreamed of and hearkening back to your time as a graduate student.
And so you were associate director from 1983 to 2001, and you came back for an interim period in 2009-10. But just to pull back a little bit, you've been here for a lot of CASBS history. You've been around and had your finger on the pulse of social science, cross-disciplinary research through a lot of post-war social science history. You've had this incredible perch to be an observer of the social sciences. I can't think of any better perches.
So let's tackle CASBS history first. You've had an incredible viewpoint, and even today in retirement, you are a big champion of CASBS, you come to our public events, and so you still keep in touch with what CASBS is up to. Can you just broadly discuss CASBS own evolution since you came to know it?
Bob Scott: The big issue I would point to is, it would be very hard to find anybody who is a fellow here or who wants to be a fellow here or whatever. It would be very hard to find somebody who says, I think interdisciplinary work is a really dumb idea. Everybody is in favor of it.
But getting them to do it and take it seriously is a huge challenge. And the typical thing is that, let's say I'm working on a topic like income inequality, and I'm a sociologist, and I'm talking to somebody who studies that, but they're an economist or a political scientist and so on. And I say, this is what I'm working on.
Their first answer is going to be, you're asking all the wrong questions. And what that's code for is, in my discipline, that's not what we study. And when you try to get them to actually listen to what it is you're saying and what your perspective brings to it, it's very hard for them to incorporate that into their thinking.
So the work of interdisciplinary work is hard work. It is hard work, and it takes a long time. If I could take just one example, we had a group here several, I remember how many years ago.
The title of the special project was Music Cognition. It consisted of three cognitive psychologists and three musicologists who wanted to come together to develop the field of music cognition. What brought them together is that the six of them had been on panels together at professional meetings and realized they shared common interests.
They thought, wouldn't it be great if we could just come together and spend the year? So we worked it out and brought them here. They were here for about three months, and the head of the group came to see me and she said, I don't know what we're going to do.
We can't talk to each other. And I said, really? And she said, yeah, our worlds are so diverse, so different, that I don't know what we're going to do.
And I said, and this is by way of saying, this is the price that is paid by siloed disciplinary social organization. And so I said to her, go back to the seminar room and start working on this. And what they discovered by the end of the year is that they were actually able to transcend one another's disciplinary silos and came up with a wonderful, wonderful project.
But it took a year of sustained listening and talking and understanding that people from these two different worlds asked different questions, think differently and so on before they could come together. So that's what I mean by saying how hard that work is. Another example, of course, would be behavioral economics, which the Center played a big role in that.
And that initially was just completely rejected by traditional economics, and now it's really become a very central part of it. But it's hard work, and it's not obvious, and it's not a matter of just sitting down and saying, tell me what you study, because you get that reaction, you're asking the wrong questions, and they're not. They're asking different questions, and you have to understand why they're asking those questions.
So that's why I think this Center is so vitally important to the whole social and behavioral sciences enterprise, because it is a place and provides a resource where you can have those sustained conversations.
Mike Gaetani: You just alluded to something that goes beyond silo busting, which is an important function that the Center plays for its fellows and for people that it brings in for special projects and summer institutes, and that is CASBS has been the convergence point for some field building, and whether it's the contentious politics literature where Tarot, Tilly and McAdam came together, the behavioral economics group you mentioned, even a piece of evolutionary psychology in the late 80s and early 90s, and many others. Are there one or two examples besides behavioral economics that you think of where CASBS was a major role player in field building?
Bob Scott: Sure. If you think about all the work that's been done on evolutionary biology by people who study primates, there were two special projects on that, people who study cetaceans, the other leg of the evolutionary chain. The center played an absolutely central role.
Richard Wrangham was the key guy there in bringing together both groups, and they really put that field on a very, very solid setting. Cognitive psychology is another one that owes a great deal of debt to the center. Network analysis, now big data analysis.
I mean, the list goes on and on where the center, it's not that the only place in the world that this was being developed was here. It's not that, but it's that the center was able to provide a resource that stimulated the development of that in a way that other places could not.
Mike Gaetani: Yes, we often say that CASBS has served as an accelerant or a stimulant, and sometimes we can't claim full credit for a sub-discipline or a line of research. There's lots of proud mothers and fathers out there, but we have propelled forward lots of fields. And I'll just say as a side note that we had Richard Wrangham on the podcast like a year and a half ago, and we can link to that episode as well.
Circling back to a question I asked a few minutes ago, you weren't an outside observer watching CASBS evolution. You were on the inside. You played a major role in shaping the Center for 20 years or so as Associate Director. So you think about your time as Associate Director. What are you most proud of having done?
Bob Scott: Oh, yeah. Well, two things. Volleyball, but we'll get to that later.
But the other is, over the course of my tenure here, I probably sat in on, I don't know, six to seven hundred seminars, presentations by fellows. And it's not that, like I'm this brilliant repository of encyclopedic knowledge. It's not that.
But rather, you get a sense of connections between lines of work that speakers themselves don't have. And one of the most exciting things to me was bringing together fellows working on topics that they didn't even know each other and saying to them, in effect, you really ought to be talking to each other, because I'll give you an example. We had one year an art historian, and he was writing a book about a whole bunch of paintings of the God-denying fool.
The guy next door to him was a physiological psychologist studying vision.
And I got talking to the two of them, and I thought, oh my God, they really ought to talk to each other. And I sat them down and I said, you know, you guys are really actually talking about the same identical problem of visual comprehension. You just don't know it.
And got them far enough along so that they began collaborating in a very productive way. I would say that every year that I was here, at the end of the year, some fellow or the other would come by and would say to me, how did you guys know that I should have been talking to X? And I'd say, well, that's why they paid me the big bucks.
But actually, it's not that. It's that you create an environment where serendipitous discoveries can happen. And you just get the smartest people you can and feed them lunch and let them go. And wonderful things are going to happen and have happened and will happen.
Mike Gaetani: We pretty much stick to those talking points today, Bob. Serendipitous interactions. Sometimes we can play a midwife role in helping curate groups, but it's equally satisfying when you don't see it coming.
Bob Scott: No, no. And that's why this institution is so unique because I can't think of another institution in our fields where this opportunity for prolonged, sustained dialogue in a relaxed setting and in a very supportive environment can take place. So I'm unfit for employment anywhere else in the world.
Mike Gaetani: Yeah, you still got the chops. We've got to put you on the payroll. We're going to recall you again. Well, let's go to your other thing that you're most proud of, volleyball. What's that all about?
Bob Scott: Well, people always thought that volleyball was about volleyball, and it never was. It was about community building. And it took several forms.
One is, and I learned this from Gardner Lindsay, if you ever played volleyball when Gardner was around, you always wanted him on your team because he was merciless in his kidding and jibing and ridiculing people from other, on the other side. And that punctured egos. And it really was a great leveler so that people who would walk out there, you know, with inflated egos, never left the court after Gardner got done with them.
And I learned that from him. You just used humor. But also people would play together and they'd get to really like each other. And when they got to like each other, they became curious about what the other person was doing. And they very respectfully learned from each other what their work was. And so when I was at Princeton, if you gave a seminar, the model for the seminar was Sack the Quarterback.
What you did was you waited until somebody said something where you could jump on them and you jumped on them and scared the hell out of them and intimidated them. That never happened here. People were very constructive in their commentary, but not mean or mean-spirited or showing off or anything at all like that.
And so it just all contributed, and a lot of that came out of just playing volleyball. It just contributed to it. Other activities did as well. But it created an ambient environment that's ideal for learning from other people in a way that was very supportive. And just it exemplified what good communities can do in the way of nourishing scholarship.
Mike Gaetani: And you were the connective tissue, because there's a plaque that calls the volleyball court Scotland.
Bob Scott: Yeah, but I took a look at it when we arrived today, and now there's a pile of dirt there, so we're going to have to do an excavation.
Mike Gaetani: It's a staging area for a little bit of construction we have going on, but we have preserved the plaques. They're in storage, and we'll bring them back when this construction is complete.
Bob Scott: If I could make just one other comment. One of our fellows one year was Derek Bach, and Derek Bach was, of course, he had just stepped down as president of Harvard. And he came to see me at the end of the year, and he said, you know, in all the years I was at Harvard, people repeatedly told me that the one thing Harvard wasn't was a supportive community. And he said, I had no idea what they were talking about. Now I do. So there you are. There's a quote for you.
Mike Gaetani: That's high praise for CASBS.
Bob Scott: It is.
Mike Gaetani: One other note about volleyball. You played volleyball not only with fellows, not only on the court at CASBS, but sometimes they were mud volleyball matches. And I think we'll link to this in the show notes.
I did a Q&A with Bob Inman and Dan Rubenfeld, two fellows from the early 90s. And they talked about playing mud volleyball with you. And then you sent me a couple of years ago an epic photo of a group of fellows and you covered in mud playing volleyball.
Bob Scott: That was my proudest hour. I got eight fellows dressed up and wallowing in the mud. I was so proud of that.
Mike Gaetani: All right. So listeners are in for a treat if they go to the link where they can see this photo of Bob and some fellows covered in mud. So I talked about CASBIS history, your perch. If you think about just social and behavioral sciences in general in the postwar period and you've been a keen observer of them, what can you say about the direction of social science research from your point of view?
Bob Scott: When I was a graduate student, the big debate was between two schools of theory, instructionalism and functionalism. And if you would go to a meeting of the American Sociological Association, they'd line up like tribes on either side and have these big debates. And people like Talcott Parsons on one side and Robert Merton on the other and so on.
So that's gone, mercifully, it's gone. And in its place, what has developed are huge reservoirs of data. And it's becoming more and more data driven.
And as that happens, the necessity for big time theory starts to fade. And the result of that is, I mean, a really good example of that is in behavioral economics. Where psychologists got in there and actually with data were able to show how people actually make decisions.
And that required a complete transformation of the basic paradigm of economics, which was positing this irrational actor idea in the absence of data. So more and more I see the capacity for amalgamating huge bodies of data as a big change that provided people who are doing the data will be guided by what it's telling them. It's creating, I think, a much more robust picture of human behavior in all of its complexities than would be possible if you have to rely so heavily on theory as things did when I sort of got started.
Mike Gaetani: Just carrying that forward, I'm interested in knowing, are there major questions, one or two burning questions in the social sciences that haven't been answered yet that you thought may be answered by now or that you'd like to see answered? Give me a couple.
Bob Scott: Give me a fellowship.
Well, let me comment that in a slightly oblique way. What I am really struck by, I've read all these entries, and what I am really struck by is how muted the attention is to climate change. And it is transforming these areas in, I mean, you can't talk about political polarization or migration or poverty or civil war or any of those topics without factoring in the impact that climate change is having.
And so I would, you know, that's an example of something where I think it has to become much more front and center. There's a fabulous book that's been published last year by John Doar of Kleiner Perkins, you know, that guy? Well, it's called Speed and Scale, and it's brilliant.
Basically, laying out what is the challenge of climate change, what do we have to do to get our hands wrapped around this problem in ways that won't destroy our Earth. It's really, really good. Very thoughtful, and John Doerr, you know, is the guy who just gave Stanford $1 billion.
Right? That's the guy. To back up what it is he's trying to say.
And I would recommend to any social or behavioral scientist, take a look at that book and see what he has to say. Because it's not just a, it's not about gloom and doom. It's laying out a plan that's doable, but you got to get on it right away. And that's what speed and scale is all about. So that's one topic.
There's another topic that I'm on to right now. And I'm mentioning this in hopes that anybody listening to this can be in touch with me with ideas. And what I'm interested in is monumental building. You may know that after I left the Center, I wrote a book about Gothic cathedrals.
And I'm now working on a project about Stonehenge. And what I'm trying to figure out is what is the human impulse that gives rise to this impetus to build monumental, eternally lasting architectural structures because they're popping up in every culture as far as I can tell and for various reasons. But that's the topic that I'm...
And so far I haven't found anything that quite touches this thing in a way that satisfies me that they understand what the impulse behind it is. But it's sure there.
Mike Gaetani: I take note that your book on cathedrals is in CASBS Ralph W. Tyler collection because you must have done a little bit of work on it while you were on the staff.
Bob Scott: I did. I did, yeah. If I could make a comment about that, I got interested in that topic while I was still a professor at Princeton. There is no way I could have written that book there because it didn't fit any framework within the sociology enterprise of that university or any university. It was only when I got here that I was liberated to take on that topic, and fellows were wonderful.
They'd say, Oh, that's so interesting. And they offered their insight. None of them ever said, Well, you're not going to get tenured writing a book like that. So I owe a lot to the Center that I was able to pursue that, and I certainly worked on it while I was here.
Mike Gaetani: Would you say that being Associate Director of CASBS is better than having tenure?
Bob Scott: Oh, not even close. And being Associate Director of CASBS is better than being director. I was able to do far more as the Associate Director than I would ever have been able to do as director.
Mike Gaetani: Before we steer towards home, I just wanted to give you a chance to talk about anything you wanted to talk about in this podcast. Did you come with anything?
Bob Scott: No, I just… if there were a mechanism for arriving fellows, where at the foot of the hill, before they come through the gate, you could open up their heads. That's what I do. That's what I would do.
No, just make them receptive to the lines of work by other people, because it takes them a while, I think, to realize they're in a community of people who are very smart, and there must be some reason why they're spending their time studying what they're studying. And getting them to really take seriously that idea and embrace it, they'll really grow with it.
The other thing I would say is, if anybody says they're coming here to write a textbook, throw them out. That's a waste of time. It's a waste of a year. They could do that on a Saturday afternoon wherever they are. That's not the best use of this opportunity.
You know, there was a fabulous reception that the last class of fellows held for me here, and they did this hilarious thing where they were trying to provide data on, was there any evidence that I had any impact at all on the Center? And they were going through books published and all that sort of thing. It was really hilarious. David Brady and Doug McAdam were going at it with this. And I said, Ah, but you left out one thing.
And they said, What's that? I said, The books I convinced fellows not to write. That's my real contribution.
Mike Gaetani: That is quite a contribution. You know, would you say that there needs to be excellence in the disciplines before scholars can be interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary? Or do you have to find the holes in the disciplines, the lack of excellence in disciplines first?
Bob Scott: I guess I'd answer that in the following way. It's not about smarts, in my opinion. You need a certain level of expertise to operate and function in the academic world. There's no doubt about that.
But some of the most brilliant people are some of the most closed minds that I've known. It's really much more an attitude of openness to the world and not feeling like you have to defend whatever you're doing to its death.
If I can mention one other thing, it was the one failed project that I really regret failed. I was reading a treatise. This had to do with all this work I was doing on cathedrals. An essay by Thomas Aquinas, and the essay was Retractiones. And what it was, it was written at the end of his life. What he said is, I'm going to look across the corpus of my work, and I'm going to tell you where the dead ends were. Don't bother with these.
And I thought, what a great idea for a fellowship for a senior scholar. You could take a towering figure like Milton Friedman or Ken Arrow or whoever, and say, have at it, because you don't want generations of students wasting their time on ideas that you are discarding.
Well, I presented that to the board, and they loved that idea, and they said, that's really great. So Neil Smelzer and I tried to recruit people, and we hit a brick wall. Predictably, they said, I haven't done my best work yet. I mean, come on, you're 85 years old, give me a break here. So we could never get them to basically say, you know what, that was a mistake.
But, boy, I'm a big advocate of the idea of acknowledge your mistakes. Don't put that off on younger generations to waste their time on it. But I couldn't get any traction at all on that.
Mike Gaetani: Well, Bob, this has been great. But I hope this first conversation about emerging trends in the social and behavioral sciences is one among many conversations I hope to have with you in the future. And I hope former fellows who are exposed to your genius as associate director can help us spread the word about emerging trends. So thanks, Bob, so much.
Bob Scott: Thank you. It's a real pleasure.
Narator: That was CASBS legend Robert A. Scott talking about his project Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences and, of course, discussing his illustrious career as the center's longtime associate director. Again, be sure to explore the episode notes for this one.
There you can access links to the Emerging Trends project, Bob's illuminating introductory essay, and, of course, that photo of Bob and the CASBS fellows playing mud volleyball. And a note to listeners, if you enjoy the types of issues and guests that appear on Human Centered, think about giving a listen to Social Science Bites, a podcast series you can access on Social Science Space, a site produced by Sage Publishing, or wherever you get your podcasts. The monthly episodes offer 20-minute interviews with leading social and behavioral scientists sharing their perspectives on how our social world is created and how social science can help us understand people and how they behave.
Its back catalog includes topics ranging from crowd psychology and behavioral economics to inequality, the fear of death, and much more. Check out Social Science Bites at socialsciencespace.com or wherever you get your podcasts. As always, you can follow us online or in your podcast app of choice as well.
And if you're interested in learning more about the Center's people, projects, and rich history, come visit us online or at casbs.stanford.edu. Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.