Kling on Duncan Watts and "Scientism"

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"... social theorists are people too, and so they make the same mistakes as planners, politicians, marketers, and business strategists make, which is to dramatically underestimate the difficulty of what they are trying to do. And just like planners, politicians, and so on, no matter how many times such grand theories fail, there is always someone who thinks that it can't be that difficult... social scientists, like everyone else, participate in social life and feel as if they can understand why people do what they do simply by thinking about it. It is not surprising, therefore, that many social scientific explanations suffer from the same weaknesses—ex post facto assertions of rationality, representative individuals, special people, and correlation substituting for causation—that pervade our commonsense explanations as well." — Duncan Watts, Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer

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In his book Everything is Obvious,1 sociologist Duncan Watts emphasizes the mismatch between the complexity of large-scale social processes and the simple heuristics that we readily apply with excessive confidence in trying to explain and predict the behavior and interactions of individuals and groups.
 
Watts' book can be regarded as an extended argument in favor of what I might term Epistemological Skepticism about Social Phenomena, or ESSP. Those of us with ESSP believe that we should be skeptical about how much we can know with certainty in the fields known as the social sciences. We may learn things that are true for a majority of cases under specific circumstances. But we are less likely to find perfectly reliable, broadly applicable laws comparable to those found by physicists.
The opposite of believing in ESSP is what Friedrich Hayek termed "scientism." Scientism is a belief that social phenomena can be understood in a scientific manner. It is the belief that we should be able to explain and predict social outcomes on the basis of simple, powerful, verifiable universal principles.

Source: Arnold Kling, "Do We Need ESSP?" the Library of Economics and Liberty, July 7, 2014