The social sciences are one of three divisions of science, along with natural science and formal science. Social science concerns itself with human aspects of the world, like the arts and humanities, although social science places more effort on experimentation and the scientific method. Because the methods used the social sciences are often qualitative and based more on personal interpretation, they are often referred to as the “soft sciences” in contrast to the “hard” natural and formal sciences. The social sciences include anthropology, economics, education, geography, history, law, linguistics, political science, psychology, sociology, communication studies, development studies, information science, and sociobiology.

The social sciences have existed at least since Ancient Greece, where philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle studied numerous aspects of the world and passed them down via texts. To these thinkers, there was no fundamental distinction between social and natural science the way there is today. Disciplines such as geometry and psychology were intermixed and practiced by the same communities. Today, science is much more specialized and complex. No one person can make contributions to all or even too many fields.

Although social science has been practiced by learned people throughout history, the modern application of the scientific method to human thoughts and relationships was only first popularized by Sigmund Freud in Austria and William James in the United States in the early 20th century. Prior to this, there were thinkers such as John Dewey who tried to combine the scientific method with social matters, paying special attention to the influence of Darwin on philosophy.

Today, millions of people do work in social science professionally. Because human relationships and qualities are so very complex, in some fields there is no objective truth and much work is based on interpretation. What defines “truth” in social sciences is more often opinion than experimentally-verified fact, making findings from social science less reliable than those from the harder sciences. However, the social sciences are essential to human flourishing and progress, and will continue to be practiced and heavily invested in as long as civilization continues to exist.