How Social Science Can Help Us Make Better Choices

Chris Brown is Professor of Education at the University of Portsmouth, UK. He is author of Achieving Evidence Informed Policy and Practice in Education: Evidenced and Leading the Use of Research and Evidence in Schools. In 2016, he was awarded the Jeffrey V. Bennett Award for Outstanding International Research.

The author considers the role of social science in helping people make better choices and explores people's reactions to optimal rational positions, propositions that set requirements for change. He argues that because these positions consist of a combination of hard facts and a general desire to improve people's lives, they present people with a substantive requirement to do something different, and that people should want to pursue optimal rational positions because they put forth the types of behaviors that will enable them to live healthier, happier, or more productive lives; improve the lives and outcomes of others; or ensure social and environmental sustainability. He discusses how optimal rational positions can be obtained by understanding what is needed to change people's perspectives and behaviors, and how the plan of action can be implemented to help achieve this change. He describes the idea of optimal rationality; how semiotic analysis can fill gaps in rationality; an optimal rationality case study from education (of teachers who are not using evidence-informed practice to improve teaching and student outcomes); how the semiotic idea of "scenes" can be used to change the desirability of an optimal rational position and people's wish to be associated with it; and lessons from this work for social science and the ways researchers can develop approaches to maximize the types of optimal rational position-related behavior to improve lives.

• Introduction1. An Introduction to Optimal Rationality2. Using Semiotic Analysis to Fill Rationality Gaps3. A Case Study from Education - Part 14. A Case Study from Education - Part 25. Attending to the Signifier - Using 'Scenes' to Make Optimal Rational Positions More Attractive;6. Lessons for Social Science Moving ForwardAppendix 1: Full Analysis of the Interview Data from Chapter 3;