concept paper humanities

Concept Papers in Research: Deciphering the blueprint of brilliance

Concept papers hold significant importance as a precursor to a full-fledged research proposal in academia and research. Understanding the nuances and significance of a concept paper is essential for any researcher aiming to lay a strong foundation for their investigation.

Table of Contents

What Is Concept Paper

A concept paper can be defined as a concise document which outlines the fundamental aspects of a grant proposal. It outlines the initial ideas, objectives, and theoretical framework of a proposed research project. It is usually two to three-page long overview of the proposal. However, they differ from both research proposal and original research paper in lacking a detailed plan and methodology for a specific study as in research proposal provides and exclusion of the findings and analysis of a completed research project as in an original research paper. A concept paper primarily focuses on introducing the basic idea, intended research question, and the framework that will guide the research.

Purpose of a Concept Paper

A concept paper serves as an initial document, commonly required by private organizations before a formal proposal submission. It offers a preliminary overview of a project or research’s purpose, method, and implementation. It acts as a roadmap, providing clarity and coherence in research direction. Additionally, it also acts as a tool for receiving informal input. The paper is used for internal decision-making, seeking approval from the board, and securing commitment from partners. It promotes cohesive communication and serves as a professional and respectful tool in collaboration.

These papers aid in focusing on the core objectives, theoretical underpinnings, and potential methodology of the research, enabling researchers to gain initial feedback and refine their ideas before delving into detailed research.

Key Elements of a Concept Paper

Key elements of a concept paper include the title page , background , literature review , problem statement , methodology, timeline, and references. It’s crucial for researchers seeking grants as it helps evaluators assess the relevance and feasibility of the proposed research.

Writing an effective concept paper in academic research involves understanding and incorporating essential elements:

How to Write a Concept Paper?

To ensure an effective concept paper, it’s recommended to select a compelling research topic, pose numerous research questions and incorporate data and numbers to support the project’s rationale. The document must be concise (around five pages) after tailoring the content and following the formatting requirements. Additionally, infographics and scientific illustrations can enhance the document’s impact and engagement with the audience. The steps to write a concept paper are as follows:

1. Write a Crisp Title:

Choose a clear, descriptive title that encapsulates the main idea. The title should express the paper’s content. It should serve as a preview for the reader.

2. Provide a Background Information:

Give a background information about the issue or topic. Define the key terminologies or concepts. Review existing literature to identify the gaps your concept paper aims to fill.

3. Outline Contents in the Introduction:

Introduce the concept paper with a brief overview of the problem or idea you’re addressing. Explain its significance. Identify the specific knowledge gaps your research aims to address and mention any contradictory theories related to your research question.

4. Define a Mission Statement:

The mission statement follows a clear problem statement that defines the problem or concept that need to be addressed. Write a concise mission statement that engages your research purpose and explains why gaining the reader’s approval will benefit your field.

5. Explain the Research Aim and Objectives:

Explain why your research is important and the specific questions you aim to answer through your research. State the specific goals and objectives your concept intends to achieve. Provide a detailed explanation of your concept. What is it, how does it work, and what makes it unique?

6. Detail the Methodology:

Discuss the research methods you plan to use, such as surveys, experiments, case studies, interviews, and observations. Mention any ethical concerns related to your research.

7. Outline Proposed Methods and Potential Impact:

Provide detailed information on how you will conduct your research, including any specialized equipment or collaborations. Discuss the expected results or impacts of implementing the concept. Highlight the potential benefits, whether social, economic, or otherwise.

8. Mention the Feasibility

Discuss the resources necessary for the concept’s execution. Mention the expected duration of the research and specific milestones. Outline a proposed timeline for implementing the concept.

9. Include a Support Section:

Include a section that breaks down the project’s budget, explaining the overall cost and individual expenses to demonstrate how the allocated funds will be used.

10. Provide a Conclusion:

Summarize the key points and restate the importance of the concept. If necessary, include a call to action or next steps.

Although the structure and elements of a concept paper may vary depending on the specific requirements, you can tailor your document based on the guidelines or instructions you’ve been given.

Here are some tips to write a concept paper:

Example of a Concept Paper

Here is an example of a concept paper. Please note, this is a generalized example. Your concept paper should align with the specific requirements, guidelines, and objectives you aim to achieve in your proposal. Tailor it accordingly to the needs and context of the initiative you are proposing.

 Download Now!

Importance of a Concept Paper

Concept papers serve various fields, influencing the direction and potential of research in science, social sciences, technology, and more. They contribute to the formulation of groundbreaking studies and novel ideas that can impact societal, economic, and academic spheres.

A concept paper serves several crucial purposes in various fields:

In summary, a well-crafted concept paper is essential in outlining a clear, concise, and structured framework for new ideas or proposals. It helps in assessing the feasibility, viability, and potential impact of the concept before investing significant resources into its implementation.

How well do you understand concept papers? Test your understanding now! 

Fill the Details to Check Your Score

Role of AI in Writing Concept Papers

The increasing use of AI, particularly generative models, has facilitated the writing process for concept papers. Responsible use involves leveraging AI to assist in ideation, organization, and language refinement while ensuring that the originality and ethical standards of research are maintained.

AI plays a significant role in aiding the creation and development of concept papers in several ways:

1. Idea Generation and Organization

AI tools can assist in brainstorming initial ideas for concept papers based on key concepts. They can help in organizing information, creating outlines, and structuring the content effectively.

2. Summarizing Research and Data Analysis

AI-powered tools can assist in conducting comprehensive literature reviews, helping writers to gather and synthesize relevant information. AI algorithms can process and analyze vast amounts of data, providing insights and statistics to support the concept presented in the paper.

3. Language and Style Enhancement

AI grammar checker tools can help writers by offering grammar, style, and tone suggestions, ensuring professionalism. It can also facilitate translation, in case a global collaboration.

4. Collaboration and Feedback

AI platforms offer collaborative features that enable multiple authors to work simultaneously on a concept paper, allowing for real-time contributions and edits.

5. Customization and Personalization

AI algorithms can provide personalized recommendations based on the specific requirements or context of the concept paper. They can assist in tailoring the concept paper according to the target audience or specific guidelines.

6. Automation and Efficiency

AI can automate certain tasks, such as citation formatting, bibliography creation, or reference checking, saving time for the writer.

7. Analytics and Prediction

AI models can predict potential outcomes or impacts based on the information provided, helping writers anticipate the possible consequences of the proposed concept.

8. Real-Time Assistance

AI-driven chat-bots can provide real-time support and answers to specific questions related to the concept paper writing process.

AI’s role in writing concept papers significantly streamlines the writing process, enhances the quality of the content, and provides valuable assistance in various stages of development, contributing to the overall effectiveness of the final document.

Concept papers serve as the stepping stone in the research journey, aiding in the crystallization of ideas and the formulation of robust research proposals. It the cornerstone for translating ideas into impactful realities. Their significance spans diverse domains, from academia to business, enabling stakeholders to evaluate, invest, and realize the potential of groundbreaking concepts.

Frequently Asked Questions

A concept paper can be defined as a concise document outlining the fundamental aspects of a grant proposal such as the initial ideas, objectives, and theoretical framework of a proposed research project.

A good concept paper should offer a clear and comprehensive overview of the proposed research. It should demonstrate a strong understanding of the subject matter and outline a structured plan for its execution.

Concept paper is important to develop and clarify ideas, develop and evaluate proposal, inviting collaboration and collecting feedback, presenting proposals for academic and research initiatives and allocating resources.

I got wonderful idea

Rate this article Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Enago Academy's Most Popular Articles

• Career Corner
• Trending Now

Recognizing the signs: A guide to overcoming academic burnout

As the sun set over the campus, casting long shadows through the library windows, Alex…

• Diversity and Inclusion

Reassessing the Lab Environment to Create an Equitable and Inclusive Space

The pursuit of scientific discovery has long been fueled by diverse minds and perspectives. Yet…

• AI in Academia

Simplifying the Literature Review Journey — A comparative analysis of 6 AI summarization tools

Imagine having to skim through and read mountains of research papers and books, only to…

• Reporting Research

How to Improve Lab Report Writing: Best practices to follow with and without AI-assistance

Imagine you’re a scientist who just made a ground-breaking discovery! You want to share your…

Achieving Research Excellence: Checklist for good research practices

Academia is built on the foundation of trustworthy and high-quality research, supported by the pillars…

Sign-up to read more

Subscribe for free to get unrestricted access to all our resources on research writing and academic publishing including:

• 2000+ blog articles
• 50+ Webinars
• 10+ Expert podcasts
• 50+ Infographics
• 10+ Checklists
• Research Guides

We hate spam too. We promise to protect your privacy and never spam you.

I am looking for Editing/ Proofreading services for my manuscript Tentative date of next journal submission:

What should universities' stance be on AI tools in research and academic writing?

We use cookies on this site to enhance your experience

By clicking any link on this page you are giving your consent for us to set cookies.

A link to reset your password has been sent to your email.

Back to login

We need additional information from you. Please complete your profile first before placing your order.

Thank you. payment completed., you will receive an email from us to confirm your registration, please click the link in the email to activate your account., there was error during payment, orcid profile found in public registry, download history, understanding and developing a concept paper.

• Charlesworth Author Services
• 15 December, 2021

A concept paper, simply put, is a one- to two-page written document describing an idea for a project . At this stage, there is no need to flesh out details, but rather just introduce the overall rationale of the project, how it’ll be carried out and the expected outcomes. There is no hard rule as to how this should be structured, but below are some tips on what to include and why to include them.

Discuss the rationale

The need for the project is an important aspect to address, and is often something a funding body might look for when considering funding a project. A concept paper might be the first thing a funding round requests to get an idea of what the project is all about. So make sure that it includes:

• Importance of the work being proposed
• What the impact (not the same as ‘ impact factor ’ – see later below) will be
• How the outcomes of your project might meet or respond to the need
• Priorities of your intended audience

Outline your methodology and procedures

Your overall methodology , i.e. how you intend to approach your work, should be outlined here to give your reader an idea of how you propose to achieve your research objectives. Mentioning the proposed methodology in advance allows them to conduct an independent evaluation into whether it is a valid approach.

Further, you should highlight some exciting, specific procedures or methods that you might be especially well-placed to perform. For example, your institute may have a specific piece of equipment, or you may have access to very high quality expertise. This will inspire confidence in the review panel that you are well-positioned to take the project on.

Describe the potential impact

Impact is a term often thrown around in research circles, usually relating to the ‘impact factor’ of a journal. Impact in this instance does not refer to that. The impact that you should be describing here is the real-world impact of your work.

Will your idea or innovation change people’s lives? Will it save the taxpayer money? How will it do those things?

Make sure you describe impacts that go beyond discovering something new to shaking up your research community.

A concept paper is a loose framework by which you are able to quickly communicate an idea for a piece of work you might want to do in the future. At the very least, it can help you put ideas to paper and look at them as a whole, allowing you to critically assess what is needed to make it a reality. In the best case scenario, a concept paper might be used to advance your grant applications or attract investment for your idea. Whatever you are using it for, it is a valuable piece of writing that can help you formalise your idea and make it a reality.

Read next (second) in series: Writing a successful Research Proposal

Maximise your publication success with Charlesworth Author Services.

Charlesworth Author Services, a trusted brand supporting the world’s leading academic publishers, institutions and authors since 1928. 

To know more about our services, visit: Our Services

Share with your colleagues

Related resources.

Writing a successful Research Proposal

Charlesworth Author Services 08/03/2022 00:00:00

Concept Paper vs. Research Proposal – and when to use each

Preparing and writing your PhD Research Proposal

Charlesworth Author Services 02/08/2021 00:00:00

Related webinars

Bitesize Webinar: Writing Competitive Grant Proposals: Module 1- Unpacking the Request for Proposals

Charlesworth Author Services 09/03/2021 00:00:00

Bitesize Webinar: Writing Competitive Grant Proposals: Module 2- Choosing the Right Funder

Bitesize Webinar: Writing Competitive Grant Proposals: Module 3- Structuring the Proposal

Bitesize Webinar: Writing Competitive Grant Proposals: Module 4- Developing a Grant Budget

How to write the Rationale for your research

Charlesworth Author Services 19/11/2021 00:00:00

A guide to finding the right Funding Agency for your project

Charlesworth Author Services 27/01/2021 00:00:00

Difference between Methodology and Method

Charlesworth Author Services 15/12/2021 00:00:00

• school Campus Bookshelves
• menu_book Bookshelves
• perm_media Learning Objects
• login Login
• how_to_reg Request Instructor Account
• hub Instructor Commons
• Download Page (PDF)
• Download Full Book (PDF)
• Periodic Table
• Physics Constants
• Scientific Calculator
• Reference & Cite
• Tools expand_more
• Readability

selected template will load here

This action is not available.

1.2: Introduction to Humanities Overview

• Last updated
• Save as PDF
• Page ID 88996

• Lori-Beth Larsen
• Central Lakes College

This course is an introductory survey of the genres and themes of the humanities. Readings, lectures, and class discussions will focus on genres such as music, the visual arts, drama, literature, and philosophy. As themes, the ideas of freedom, love, happiness, death, nature, and myth may be explored from a western and non-western point of view.

Goal Area: Humanities and Fine Arts

To expand students’ knowledge of the human condition and human cultures , especially in relation to behavior, ideas and values expressed in works of human imagination and thought . Through study in disciplines such as literature, philosophy and the fine arts, students will engage in critical analysis, form aesthetic judgments and develop an appreciation of the arts and humanities as fundamental to the health and survival of any society . Students should have experiences in both the arts and humanities.

Take some time in a notebook or in a digital document, write down some answers to these questions. As you do, think about your experiences and thoughts. Write down some examples of humanity. You’ll return back to these questions throughout the course, so make sure you save them and add to them as we progress though the class.

What do you know about the human condition and human cultures?

What do you want to know about the human condition and human cultures?

What are the behaviors, ideas and values expressed in works of human imagination and thought?

Is it important to engage in critical analysis and form aesthetic judgments about the arts?

How do we develop an appreciation of the arts and humanities as fundamental to the health and survival of any society?

Goal Area: Global Perspective

To increase students’ understanding of the growing interdependence of nations and peoples and develop their ability to apply a comparative perspective to cross-cultural social, economic and political experiences.

What do cultures around the world contribute to humanity?

What do we see that comes from where?

How can I expand what I value?

What makes these contributions strong?

Essential Questions:

This course is organized around questions instead of answers. I hope, as you answer these questions, you will learn to think critically and your learning will be deep. Primarily, in this class you’ll need to rely on your curiosity. Being curious will be important.

Reflective Learning Journal

Each week as you progress through the lessons, take notes. As you read, listen, and talk about the stuff you’re learning, write down what you’re learning and thinking. You can use these notes to write a reflective learning journal at the end of each week. You might want to take notes on a class discussion as well. You might also be loading a Prezi, a photo of your own art, a video, an essay, or a podcast in this blog.

The reflective journal summarizes the week and should tell about the tasks, learning experiences, activities and opportunities you have been involved in during the week of the report.

Here are directions for creating the reflective learning journal as a blog posting.

Blog Instructions

• If you do not have a gmail account, open an account at: http://mail.google.com/
• Go to http://www.blogger.com
• Click on "Create Your Blog Now"
• Click "Continue" and sign in with your gmail account and password
• Give your blog an appropriate title and a Web address (URL)
• Click "Continue"
• Choose a template (How do you want the background of the blog to look?)
• Click "Start Posting"
• Type in an appropriate title and text; add an appropriate image and Web link with the posting.
• To add a Web link, highlight the text or URL that you want to be the link then click on the icon with the green globe or the word “Link” and type or paste in an appropriate link. Click “OK” then publish the post.
• Click on the “Add Image” icon on the menu; browse and locate an image file (or find an image on the Web); choose a layout then click on “Upload Image”
• Click on “View Blog” to see what your posting looks like; if you wish to edit, click on “Customize” or “Dashboard” to access the Settings option or Posting option to edit posts
• To edit posts or add a new post to your blog, type in your blog address (URL) and login to your account; click on Dashboard link or New Post link or then create a new post (or edit/update an older post) with text, image, and link.
• You can find tutorials for wordpress or blogger.com on youtube.com such as: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULIUhJSKViE&feature=related

* How to Find and Save Images from the Web

• Go to Google.com
• Type in the relevant term
• Click on “Images” at the top left corner to do an image search
• Under Tools, select “Usage Rights” and “Labeled for Reuse”.
• After you find an appropriate image, click on the image, then click on “See full size image”
• Place the cursor on the image then right click – a menu box will appear
• From the menu box, choose the option “Save Image As…”
• Save the image to your desktop or to a disk
• If your image needs to be cropped or made smaller, there are free tools on the Web such as: http://www.pixlr.com/editor/
• Now the image is ready for you to upload to your blog.

Reflective Journal (30 points)

Self-Reflection Questions for Learning

What were some of the most interesting discoveries I made? About myself? About others?

What were some of my most challenging moments and what made them so?

What were some of my most powerful learning moments and what made them so?

What is the most important thing I learned personally?

What most got in the way of my progress, if anything?

What did I learn were my greatest strengths? My biggest areas for improvement?

What moments was I most proud of my efforts?

What could I do differently the next time?

What's the one thing about myself above all others I would like to work to improve?

How will I use what I've learned in the future?

Humanities Sites

Description of Humanities on Wikipedia: https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanities

Outline of the Humanities from Wikipedia: https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_the_humanities

Minnesota Humanities Center: https://mnhum.org/

What are the Humanities and Why are they important? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytR3wxwVBd0

Lumen Learning Introduction to Humanities: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/worldcivilization1/

Chris Abani: On Humanity

Chris Abani tells stories of people: People standing up to soldiers. People being compassionate. People being human and reclaiming their humanity. It's "ubuntu," he says: the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me.

Organizing Research for Arts and Humanities Papers and Theses

• General Guide Information
• Developing a Topic
• What are Primary and Secondary Sources
• What are Scholarly and Non-Scholarly Sources
• Writing an Abstract
• Writing Academic Book Reviews
• Writing A Literature Review
• Using Images and other Media

Critical Engagement

Note: these recommendations are geared toward researchers in the arts or humanities.

Developing a research topic is an iterative process, even for a short paper. This is a process that emerges in stages, and one which requires critical (but not criticizing) engagement with the evidence, literature, and prior research. The evidence can be an object, an artifact, a historic event, an idea, a theoretical framework, or existing interpretations.

Ultimately, you want to be able to pose a research question that you will then investigate in your paper.

If you are writing a paper for a course, the initial critical ideas and theoretical frameworks may come from your course readings. Pay attention to footnotes and bibliographies in your readings, because they can help you identify other potential sources of information.

As you are thinking about your topic, consider what, if anything, has already been written. If a lot of literature exists on your topic, you will need to narrow your topic down, and decide how to make it interesting for your reader. Regurgitating or synthesizing what has already been said is very unlikely to be exciting both for you and for those who will be reading your wok. If there is little or no literature on your topic, you will need to think how to frame it so as to take advantage of existing theories in the discipline. You may also be able to take advantage of existing scholarship on related topics.

Types of Research Papers

There are two common types of research papers in the arts and humanities: expository and argumentative . In an expository paper you develop an idea or critical "reading" of something, and then support your idea or "reading" with evidence. In an argumentative essay you propose an argument or a framework to engage in a dialog with and to refute an existing interpretation, and provide evidence to support your argument/interpretation, as well as evidence to refute an existing argument/interpretation. For further elaboration on expository and argumentative papers, as well and for examples of both types of essays, check the book titled The Art of Writing About Art , co-authored by Suzanne Hudson and Nancy Noonan-Morrissey, originally published in 2001. Note that particular disciplines in the arts or humanities may have other specialized types of frameworks for research.

Also, remember that a research paper is not "merely an elaborately footnoted presentation of what a dozen scholars have already said about a topic; it is a thoughtful evaluation of the available evidence , and so is, finally, an expression of what the author [i.e., you] thinks the evidence adds up to." [Sylvan Barnet, A Short Guide to Writing About Art (New York: Pearson/Longman, 2005), 238-239.]

If you select a broad topic

If a lot has been written on your topic, perhaps you should consider the following:

• why are you interested in this topic?
• is there something specific you want to address?
• can you offer a different or a more nuanced interpretation?
• is there a specific theoretical or methodological perspective that you would like to apply?
• can you shed more light on specific evidence or detail(s)?
• review scholarship cited in the footnotes/bibliographies of your readings and see if there are lacunae you can address.

If you stick with a broad topic, you run into the danger of over-generalizing or summarizing existing scholarship, both of which have limited value in contemporary arts and humanities research papers. Summarizing is generally useful for providing background information, as well as for literature reviews. However, it should not constitute the bulk of your paper.

If you select a narrow or a very new topic

If you are interested in something very specific or very new, you may find that little has been written about it. You might even find that the same information gets repeated everywhere, because nothing else is available. Consider this an opportunity for you to do unique research, and think of the following:

• is there a broader or a related topic that you can investigate in order to circle back and hone in on your chosen topic?
• can your topic be critically examined within an existing theoretical or methodological framework?
• are you able to draw on another field of study to investigate your topic?
• review scholarship cited in the footnotes/bibliographies of the readings. - in other words, engage in citation chaining.
• if the pertinent readings you find are not scholarly (this is not necessarily a bad thing), evaluate how you can use them to develop a more scholarly and critical context for investigating your topic.

Citing sources

Remember to keep track of your sources, regardless of the stage of your research. The USC Libraries have an excellent guide to citation styles  and to citation management software . 

• << Previous: General Guide Information
• Next: What are Primary and Secondary Sources >>
• Last Updated: Jan 19, 2023 3:12 PM
• URL: https://libguides.usc.edu/ah_writing

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• My Account Login
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• Open access
• Published: 08 February 2024

Integrating the humanities and the social sciences: six approaches and case studies

• Brendan Case   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4277-8075 1 &
• Tyler J. VanderWeele 2  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  231 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

996 Accesses

3 Altmetric

Metrics details

The social sciences are still young, and their interaction with older siblings such as philosophy and theology is still necessarily tentative. This paper outlines three ways in which humanistic disciplines such as philosophy and theology might inform the social sciences and three in which the social sciences might inform the humanities in turn, proceeding in each case by way of brief “case studies” to exemplify the relation. This typology is illustrative rather than exhaustive, but each of its halves nonetheless roughly tracks the development of a research project in the social sciences and humanities, respectively. In the first direction, (1) the humanities can help the social sciences identify new directions and scope for their inquiry; (2) provide conceptual clarity for constructs that the social sciences elect to study; and (3) enrich & clarify the interpretation of empirical results. Moving in the opposite direction, the social sciences can help (4) furnish new data for humanistic reflection; (5) confirm (or challenge) claims from the humanities; and (6) develop and assess interventions for achieving the goods highlighted by humanistic inquiry.

Similar content being viewed by others

The process and mechanisms of personality change

Joshua J. Jackson & Amanda J. Wright

A precision functional atlas of personalized network topography and probabilities

Robert J. M. Hermosillo, Lucille A. Moore, … Damien A. Fair

Interviews in the social sciences

Eleanor Knott, Aliya Hamid Rao, … Chana Teeger

In 1917, Max Weber famously proclaimed that “the enterprise of science as a vocation is determined by the fact that science has entered a stage of specialization that has no precedent” (Weber, 2004 : p. 7). Weber did not introduce this fragmentation as a cause for lament; on the contrary, he insisted, “Only rigorous specialization can give the scholar the feeling for what may be the one and only time in his life, that here he has achieved something that will last .” Nonetheless, he recognized that scientific specialization posed significant challenges for intellectual work of any ambition or scope: “With every piece of work that strays into neighboring territory…we must resign ourselves to the realization that the best we can hope for is to provide the expert with useful questions of the sort that he may not easily discover for himself from his own vantage point” (Weber, 2004 : p. 7).

This galloping specialization has only accelerated since Weber’s day—by some measures, there are now 176 distinct scientific sub-fields, including astronomy, atmospheric sciences, and automotive engineering (Ioannidis et al., 2019 ). And the humanities have by no means been immune from the pressure to specialize: particularly in the Anglosphere, it is rare today for a humanist—out of expedience, we’ll restrict ourselves to philosophers and theologians—to publish on more than a handful of her discipline’s classic problems, both from the sheer mass of publications in even relatively narrow sub-fields, and owing to the academic incentives for hiring and promotion. Not that all philosophers and theologians are happy about this situation: both disciplines are full of internal hand-wringing about the fragmentation of their sub-disciplines and the intellectual impoverishment it imposes. Footnote 1

In this situation of deep, Weberian specialization, it is perhaps no great surprise that even sciences closely adjacent to the humanities—“social sciences,” such as psychology, sociology, or social epidemiology—have had relatively little time or energy for opening a conversation with their seemingly strange neighbors. Some corners of the humanities—philosophy in particular—have made relatively greater progress in engaging with the findings of the social sciences, but on the whole, the lines of communication between these disparate disciplines have been few and fragmentary.

The social sciences are still young, and their interaction with older siblings such as philosophy and theology is still necessarily tentative. However, a broad paradigm for dialogue in some specific areas is now coming into focus, guided by the broad conviction that (as Mark Alfano nicely put it, riffing on Kant’s famous line about intuitions and concepts): “Moral philosophy without psychological content is empty, whereas psychological investigation without philosophical insight is blind” ( 2016 : p. 1). Footnote 2 Where Weber had proposed a clean division between the sciences’ “facts” and the humanities’ “values”—“non-overlapping magisteria,” to borrow a phrase from Gould ( 1997 )—Alfano’s maxim points to the essential complementarity of the humanities’ and social sciences’ distinctive methods. If humanists make claims about the actual world, they must do so responsibly, with due attention to specialists’ empirical inquiry. And conversely, social scientists must recognize that their concepts are rarely pellucid, their measurements are always partial, and their data is never self-interpreting, so that they can frequently profit from the analytical rigor and hermeneutical insight in which the humanities specialize.

Below, we outline three ways in which humanistic disciplines such as philosophy or theology might inform the social sciences and three in which the social sciences might inform them in turn, proceeding in each case by way of brief “case studies” to exemplify the relation. Our choice of philosophy and theology is doubly practical: these are the two humanistic disciplines in which we are most at home, as well as fields in which there has already been a fair amount both of engagement with the social sciences and methodological reflection on that engagement. These could and should be expanded by reference to other corners of the humanities. For a sketch of how a dialogue of this sort might proceed between the fields of economics and literature in particular, cf. Morson and Shapiro ( 2017 ). So too, we have chosen case studies that both reflect our own areas of expertise and furnish clear instances of the kinds of interdisciplinary interaction that we hope to highlight in each section.

This typology is illustrative rather than exhaustive, but each of its halves nonetheless roughly tracks the development of a research project in the social sciences and humanities, respectively. In the first direction, (1) the humanities can help the social sciences identify new directions and scope for their inquiry; (2) provide conceptual clarity for constructs that the social sciences elect to study; and (3) enrich & clarify the interpretation of empirical results. Moving in the opposite direction, the social sciences can help (4) furnish new data for humanistic reflection; (5) confirm (or challenge) claims from the humanities; and (6) develop and assess interventions for achieving the goods highlighted by humanistic inquiry.

Guiding inquiry: life satisfaction and eudaimonia

The humanities can help guide, direct, and motivate the research inquiries of the various social sciences. For instance, recent debates over the measurement of well-being have been explicit, if often imperfectly, influenced by ancient moral philosophy, especially in the “eudaimonistic” tradition. We will argue that although the drawing upon Aristotle’s understanding of flourishing has clearly already shaped empirical well-being research, deeper engagement with his actual views might enrich empirical work yet further. More specifically, we’ll consider two cases of this kind of philosophical influence on psychometrics (Helliwell, 2021 ; Ryff et al., 2021 ), the former drawing on classical eudaimonism to defend a central role for the assessment of “life satisfaction” in well-being research and in global development work, and the latter doing so to contrast “hedonic well-being” with “eudaimonic well-being” or “challenged thriving.”

John Helliwell is the editor of the UN’s World Happiness Report, an annual analysis of subjective well-being in 160 countries (Helliwell, 2021 ). In the Report, “happiness” is assessed using measures of self-reported experiences of positive and negative emotion and “life evaluation,” assessed by asking respondents where they would place their lives (ranging from “best” to “worst”) on a ladder (cf. Cantril, 1965 ).

Helliwell ( 2021 ) has recently drawn on Aristotle, in particular, to argue that measures of life evaluation or life satisfaction ought to be given priority over other measures of well-being, such as GDP per capita or in contemporary policy debates. He argues that the most important tools for measuring happiness are “the evaluations that individuals make of the quality of their own lives,” and goes on to quote Julia Annas (from her classic survey of ancient ethics) as noting that “ancient ethical philosophy ‘gets its grip on the individual at this point of reflection: am I satisfied with my life as a whole, and the way it has developed and promises to develop?’” (2021: 29, quoting Annas, 1993 : p. 28). This intuition motivates Aristotle’s startling insistence, citing Priam’s tragic death amid the downfall of Troy, that even a flourishing life cannot be regarded as “supremely blessed ( makarios )” unless it comes to a good end (1934: 1.9.11, p. 47). For Helliwell, measures of “life satisfaction” are Aristotelian precisely to the extent that they invite respondents to consider, not merely their current or recent mood (as questions about “happiness” might suggest), but their lives as a whole.

Helliwell notes two further senses in which life-satisfaction research is broadly Aristotelian. First, he suggests that life satisfaction measures follow Aristotle in allowing “that a good life is likely to combine elements of the viewpoints later identified as Epicurean and Stoic,” i.e., to involve both external goods and internal goods such as character and virtue (Helliwell, 2021 : 30, cf. Aristotle, 1934 : 1.8.15–16, p. 43). And second, Aristotle insisted “that the right answers [to questions about the good life] require evidence as much as introspection” (Helliwell, 2021 : p. 30, citing Aristotle, 1934 : 1.8.9–13, p. 41).

However “Aristotelian” Helliwell’s approach might be an inspiration, though, Aristotle would hardly have approved of mass surveys of life satisfaction as a supposedly adequate tool for gauging the flourishing of an individual or population. After all, he took it that most people (“the many”) mistakenly believed that the good life consists of pleasure (1934: 1.4.1–3, p. 11). Aristotle is unapologetically elitist in insisting that a flourishing life is characterized most fundamentally by “the active exercise of one’s soul’s faculties in conformity with virtue,” or (put the same point in somewhat different words) “in conformity with reason” (1934: 1.7.15, p. 33).

To his credit, Helliwell is up-front about discounting Aristotle’s “emphasis on excellence and purpose,” but an account of well-being that brackets the centrality of virtue is not Aristotelian, nor meaningfully eudaimonist in any classical sense. Indeed, precisely because they accepted the intuitive requirement that the human good must be good for one’s life as a whole, and not simply for the passing moment, even the supposedly hedonistic Epicureans had to embrace revisionary accounts of pleasure. For Epicurus, the pleasures that are really pleasant turn out to be the refined pleasures of intellectual engagement and virtuous friendship, which he summarized as a state of being undisturbed in the soul ( ataraxia ) (Annas, 1993 : pp. 334–50).

A more eudaimonistic—and arguably more adequate—approach to assessing well-being would distinguish in a finer-grained way among distinct domains—between, say, the external goods of health and wealth and the internal goods of character, meaning, and achievement—and would perhaps discount the former in view of the relatively greater importance of the latter (Symons and VanderWeele, 2023 ). This is precisely what Ryff et al. ( 2021 ) propose in distinguishing between “eudaimonic well-being” or “challenged thriving,” and “hedonic well-being” (defined to include life satisfaction, positive affect, and the absence of negative affect). They take the former category to assess the dimensions of flourishing which they claim all the ancient eudaimonists gave pride of place, such as “autonomy,” “personal growth,” “positive relations with others,” or “purpose in life” (2021: pp. 99–100; cf. also Ryff’s earlier work on this topic, in Ryff 1989 or Ryff & Keyes, 1995 ). This approach has the advantage of teasing apart two relatively distinct domains of flourishing, which differ significantly both in their demographic distribution (Ryff et al., 2021 : pp. 101–109) and in their effects on other domains, such as physical health (Ryff et al., 2021 : pp. 110–115).

Nonetheless, the absence from their description of the eudaimonic well-being of the central concept of classical eudaimonism, namely the virtues, is striking. Neither Aristotle, Zeno, nor Epicurus would have regarded autonomy or purpose in life as intrinsic goods in themselves; Hitler, after all, enjoyed a high degree of both for much of his public life, but we presumably would not want to say that he was flourishing in that period. Rather, eudaimonists would regard all of those qualities as valuable to the extent that they were shaped by the virtues, paradigmatically of wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. We might thus hypothesize that measures of “eudaimonic well-being” would be more valuable—and more predictive of other well-being outcomes—to the extent that they incorporated, not merely the thin “character strengths” beloved of much recent psychology, but the more robust excellences of character captured in the classical conception of virtue (cf. Ng and Tay, 2020 ; VanderWeele, 2022 ).

In short, the empirical study of well-being has clearly been greatly facilitated by attention to the insights of ancient moral philosophy, particularly the philosophy of Aristotle, who emphasized the diversity of goods that compose a flourishing life. Nonetheless, well-being assessment and subsequent empirical research would be more properly “eudaimonic” to the extent that it incorporated sustained attention to the virtues as such, and not merely to some of the qualities with which they are associated. Insights from the humanities—from philosophy, from theology, from history—have and almost inevitably will continue to inform, motivate, and direct research in the empirical social sciences.

Clarifying constructs: hope and optimism

For a second way in which the humanities might contribute to the social sciences, consider their role in shaping construct definitions of traits or behaviors, which profoundly shape empirical research, but are sometimes under-theorized or imprecisely defined by the social scientists who employ them. We should of course heed Aristotle’s caution not to insist on greater precision in any inquiry than its subject-matter admits (Aristotle, 1934 : 1.3.1–2, p. 7); the boundaries between human emotions or dispositions will typically be fuzzier than those distinguishing atoms in the chemical table of elements. Nonetheless, in avoiding the error of artificial precision, we ought not to license the opposite error of avoidable vagueness. For example, the terms “hope” and “optimism” are sometimes used interchangeably in ordinary language, which has arguably obscured social-scientific inquiry on these topics as well. Research on hope has been dominated by Snyder’s influential definition of hope as “the cognitive energy and pathways for goals” ( 1995 : p. 355). The items in Snyder’s accompanying measure of hope include the following: “There are lots of ways around any problem”; “I’ve been pretty successful in life”; or “I meet the goals that I set for myself.”

Notice that all of these items imply a strong expectation on the part of the respondent that the future will in fact turn out well, or even that it already has, combined with a strong sense that the respondent has the capacities and drive to bring about the desired future (Snyder, 1995 : p. 357). While Snyder explicitly distinguishes his conceptualization of hope from the related trait of “optimism,” Footnote 3 his construct definition and many of the items in his measure of hope in fact seem principally to capture an optimistic future outlook, albeit with a high degree of “self-efficacy.” Snyder’s hopeful person exemplifies what we might call “warranted optimism” or “agential optimism,” in contrast with “unwarranted” or “passive optimism.”

Snyder’s conflation of hope with an optimistic outlook has a long history. In the 17th century, René Descartes, one of the founding figures of modern European philosophy, described hope as “a disposition of the soul to be convinced that what it desires will come to pass” ( 1989 : p. 110). Snyder might seem to be on firm ground, then, in identifying hope as the confidence in one’s ability to identify the pathways to some goal, but this definition arguably screens out the most important aspects of the virtue of hope, which, as Dickinson ( 1983 ) put it, “sweetest in the gale is heard.” What about situations in which no pathway to success is evident, and so no confidence is warranted? What about when the diagnosis is terminal or the jail sentence is life without parole?

It is striking, for instance, how prominent the theme of “hope” is in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning , his memoir of his time in Auschwitz, notwithstanding his frank assessment of how bleak his future prospects were, once he was inside the concentration camp. “I said,” Frankl wrote, “that to the impartial the future must seem hopeless…Each of us could guess for himself how small were his chances of survival…But I also told [the others] that, in spite of that, I had no intention of losing hope and giving up” ( 1989 : p. 103). Frankl would have been out of his mind to affirm that “there [were] lots of ways around any problem” in Auschwitz; to any sane person, by far the likeliest outcome was misery and torture ending only with his murder. Nonetheless, Frankl was determined to fix his mind and will on a possible, future good, and that disposition helped sustain him through the agonizing years of his captivity. It would have been cruel mockery to tell Frankl to believe that he would escape, but the hope he cultivated did not require that belief; indeed, it was more , not less, truly hopeful for the bleakness of his situation.

If Frankl’s conception of hope as a disposition to be cultivated even, and perhaps especially, in the face of overwhelming odds and seemingly unendurable suffering makes no sense in light of the Descartes-Snyder model of hope, it fits well with the theory of hope developed by Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). In one of the philosophical passages of his Summa Theologiae , Aquinas distinguished hope’s particular object with reference to four conditions: “First, that it is something good…Secondly, that it is future…Thirdly, that it must be something arduous and difficult to obtain, for we do not speak of anyone hoping for trifles, which are in one’s power to have at any time…Fourthly, this difficult thing is something possible to obtain: for one does not hope for that which one cannot get at all” ( 1888 : 1–2.40.1). For Aquinas, then, hope is the desire for a future good which is difficult but possible to obtain. We can be hopeful in Aquinas’s (or Dickinson’s) sense about probable outcomes, to be sure, but hope never matters more to us than when the prognosis is grim, the outlook poor, the options few.

Incorporating philosophical and theological insights into social-scientific research would better conceptually distinguish hope from optimism. This greater clarity could give rise to more precise construct definitions and thus also more adequate and distinct measure development and so enable better empirical research on these topics. The use of philosophical resources to refine construct definitions and to clarify the logical relations between those definitions and survey items designed to capture them may have considerable potential to improve measure development in the social sciences. Footnote 4 The humanities have a real contribution to make in providing conceptual clarity for constructs that the social sciences aim to study.

Enriching interpretation: explaining and understanding marriage

The humanities can also enrich the interpretation of insights from the social sciences, by alerting them to the intrinsic limitations of their methods and bringing other disciplinary insights. Wilhelm Dilthey proposed long ago that we distinguish between “explanation ( Erklärung )” and “understanding ( Verstehen ).” Dilthey’s paradigms for explanation are drawn from the natural sciences’ penchant for reduction: in physics, the mechanics or chemistry of medium-sized dry goods are explained in terms of interacting elementary particles, and appeals to such obscure entities are justified by their adequacy in simplifying both theory and description ( 2002 : p. 107).

Much work in contemporary social science aspires to this sort of rigorous—indeed, predictive—reduction. For instance, consider the question, “Why has monogamy prevailed over polygamy as a marriage form?” This question, among many others, is given illuminating treatment by Henrich ( 2020 ). As Henrich shows, there are quite practical reasons for the gradual pressure away from polygamy (especially “polygyny,” one husband with multiple wives) and toward monogamy. This is above all a function of polygyny’s “math problem”: when men are allowed to take multiple wives, elite men tend to take many (think of King Solomon’s 700 wives and 300 concubines, 1 Kings 11:3), leaving a glut of less successful men who can’t find even one spouse (Henrich, 2020 : pp. 263–64). This is a dangerous situation, since unmarried men will often be less productive and more prone to reckless or criminal behavior than their married peers, while wives and children in polygynous families receive less investment of effort and concern from their husbands and spouses than those in monogamous families (Henrich, 2020 : pp. 268–84). Monogamy solves the math problem more elegantly than polygyny can. Henrich’s game-theoretic account of marriage’s slow evolution toward monogamy provides a paradigm of an impersonal account: it offers a vision of marriage from the outside, as an adaptive strategy on which societies naturally converge over time without any deliberate or reflective understanding. Most crucially, this kind of bottom-up explanation makes no reference to any perspective from within the institution of marriage itself.

This sort of reductive social-scientific account explains a great deal—but not everything. Indeed, much that lies closest to the heart of human life is screened out entirely by its method of “explanation,” which Dilthey opposed to “understanding ( Verstehen ),” an incommensurable and equally important mode of inquiry concerned with “spiritual ( geistlich ) objects” which are grounded in “lived experience ( Erlebnis )” and which are proper to the human sciences or “ Geisteswissenschaften (sciences of mind).” Footnote 5 The natural sciences aspire to a “view from nowhere,” as Nagel ( 1989 ) put it, an account of the world from which subjectivity has been expunged; they can depict only what McDowell called “the space of nature…the realm of law” ( 1996 : xiv–xv). Restricting accounts of human psychology and behavior to this sort of reductive explanation encourages what Mary Midgley called the spirit of “nothing-buttery,” in which apparently reasonable, noble, or loving acts are debunked as “nothing but” lust, greed, or the libido dominandi (Midgley, 2005 : p. 203). This is that “cold philosophy,” which Keats lamented must in the end “unweave the rainbow” ( 1820 : p. 41).

Happily, we are not limited to Dilthey’s Erklärung , for there are also the Geisteswissenschaften , which concern themselves with a subjectivity-saturated world, Sellars’s ( 1963 ) “logical space of reasons,” in which one is “able to justify what one says.” As Dilthey puts it, “the procedure of understanding is grounded in the realization that the external reality that constitutes its objects is totally different from the objects of the natural sciences. Spirit has objectified itself in the former, purposes have been embodied in them, values have been actualized in them” ( 2002 : p. 141).

More recently, Roger Scruton ( 2014 ) made the distinction between “explaining” and “understanding”—interpreted in terms of a “cognitive dualism,” and rooted variously in the thought of Dilthey, Sellars, and Kant, among others—central to his entire philosophical project. “Persons are objects,” Scruton notes, “but they are also subjects…This means that, while we often attempt to explain people in the way we explain other objects in our environment—in terms of cause and effect, laws of motion, and physical makeup—we also have another kind of access to their past and future conduct. In addition to explaining their behavior, we seek to understand it” ( 2014 : p. 32).

As Scruton argued elsewhere, the distinction between explanation and understanding is particularly crucial in the case of an institution such as marriage: “Anthropologists can tell us why the vow of love is useful to us and why it has been selected by our social evolution. But they have no special ability to trace its roots in human experience or to enable us to understand what happens to the moral life when the vow disappears and erotic commitment is replaced by the sexual handshake” ( 2006 : p. 13). Even if the impersonal, evolutionary account succeeds in explaining why monogamy should eventually prevail within populations of sexually dimorphous primates with slow-developing children, that in itself provides us no access to the reasons for which men and women enter into marriage, and which sustain their commitment to it. In this case, neglecting the work of understanding entirely in favor of explanation will be, not merely incomplete, but fundamentally misleading.

To begin, an account that reduces human behavior to genetically driven appetite cannot make sense of basic facts about the human experience of sexual desire. As Scruton emphasizes, the experience of sexual desire is arguably not in the first instance “a desire for sensations,” notwithstanding the determination of much empirical psychology to treat it as such. Footnote 6 Rather, it is a desire for a person —not for “his or her body, conceived as an object in the physical world, but the person conceived as an incarnate subject, in whom the light of self-consciousness shines and who confronts me eye to eye, and I to I” ( 2006 : p. 15). It is precisely because sexual desire properly aims at a communion of subjects that it takes as its focus, not the genitals, but the face, and particularly the eyes, the soul’s windows. It is also why we instinctively class rape, not with being spat upon, but with murder—it is not the unwanted contact with another’s bodily fluids that makes it a desecration, but the forcible reduction of another’s free personhood to the status of a mere, passive object ( 2006 : p. 17).

The anthropologist’s perspective allows us to explain why lifelong monogamy is an advantageous reproductive strategy, but the internal perspective allows us to understand the reasons that make that institution intelligible to its members. In this case, the two perspectives are not merely complementary, but mutually reinforcing. As Scruton observes, while “the inner, sacramental character of marriage is reinforced by its external function” of socializing sex and nurturing children, it is equally true that the external function is sustained by the internal commitments, so that “societies in which the vow of marriage is giving way to the contract for sexual pleasure are also rapidly ceasing to reproduce themselves” ( 2006 : pp. 19, 24).

Much more could be said on this controversial topic. However, it is clear that by appealing to different levels of explanation and, in particular, those concerning teleology and the reasons agents give for commitments and actions, our understanding of empirical research can be enriched. It is of course true that some social scientists (e.g., anthropologists engaged in the “thick descriptions” characteristic of participant-observer research) are also skilled practitioners of Dilthey’s Verstehen ; particular methods need have no necessary or non-transferrable connection to particular academic disciplines. In principle, then, the exchanges we describe in this section could occur within the social sciences, for instance between anthropology and psychology or economics. (For a proposal along these lines, cf. Haidt, 2012 : p. 143). Nonetheless, it is equally true that many humanists specialize in the descriptions of forms of life which Dilthey singled out as the hallmark of Verstehen , and that social scientists principally engaged in Erklärung neglect the other’s contributions at their own peril. While we have given a single example here concerning appeal to more philosophical forms of reasoning, likewise interpretation of data from the empirical social sciences can be enriched by a deeper and more philosophical exposition of relevant concepts, by theological frameworks, and by historical understanding and context.

Furnishing new data: situationism and the virtues

Let’s now turn to three ways in which the social sciences might inform the work of the humanities, first by furnishing data and evidence that may itself prompt new directions of reflection and inquiry within the humanities. In the section “Guiding Inquiry” above, we saw that moral philosophy, especially but by no means only in the West, has been centrally concerned with virtues and vices as key dimensions of a flourishing life (Dahlsgaard et al., 2005 ). In recent decades, however, findings from social psychology have sparked a wide-ranging debate among philosophers about how common the virtues and vices actually are. The “situationist” literature in social psychology, as it has come to be called, has been construed by many psychologists and philosophers alike as challenging the notion that most people possess stable virtues or vices, or even global character traits of any sort. Footnote 7

The situationist literature is vast and varied, but a few well-established findings will suffice to give its flavor:

Helping : Experimental subjects are much less likely to help a distressed stranger if they are being hurried by a third party (Darly and Batson, 1973 ) or are sitting with a third party who refuses to help (Latané and Rodin, 1969 ), but much more likely to help if they have just emerged from a bathroom or found a dime in a phone booth (Isen and Levin, 1972 ).

Generosity : Psychologists visited a Moroccan marketplace and had volunteers play cooperation games amid the stalls, either during the regular call to prayer (obligatory for all Muslims five times daily) or between calls. “During the call to prayer, 100 percent of the shopkeepers gave all of the money [they had won] to charity. At other times, the percentage of participants giving it all to charity dropped to 59 percent” (Henrich, 2020 : p. 126, discussing Duhaime, 2015 ).

Harming : Stanley Milgram found that a large majority of his test subjects could be pressured by a white-coated “supervisor” into administering what they (wrongly) believed to be painful electric shocks to a total stranger (in fact an actor bellowing convincing howls of agony and pleas for mercy), and that, across several trials, 65% were even willing to administer a deadly, 450-volt shock (Milgram, 1974 ). Footnote 8 Nonetheless, though participants in Milgram’s experiments could be pressured into cruel behavior, hardly any embraced it with verve—in other versions of Milgram’s experiment in which no pressure was applied to administer shocks, almost none did (Miller, 2016a : p. 97).

All of these findings are examples of the wider field of “social priming,” and so need to be handled carefully: priming experiments have been a central focus of the recent “replication crisis” in psychology, and many seem to presuppose rather implausible accounts of human motivation. Footnote 9 Nonetheless, in the cases above, the experiments (or close approximations to them) have been replicated, and the underlying mechanisms seem plausible: for instance, it is hardly a novel idea that social pressure, especially from authority figures or their metonymies (e.g., religious symbols), profoundly shapes human behavior for good and for ill, even if most of us typically underestimate how strongly such external factors influence us.

The data and experiments provided important new material for philosophical reflection and debate. In the late 1990s, two philosophers, Gilbert Harman and John Doris, launched the situationist debate in moral philosophy by arguing that this sort of finding provided strong evidence against the existence of any global character traits, including virtues or vices. In their view, most human behavior is instead the product of situational factors, many of them unnoticed by the agents in question (Harman, 1999 ; Doris, 2002 ; Alfano, 2014 ). A more moderate situationism has been developed by Christian Miller, for whom situationist findings indicate that most of us possess neither virtues nor vices, but rather what he calls “mixed traits,” which incline us to, e.g., honesty in some highly specified situations, and to dishonesty in others (Miller, 2013 : p. 111). Miller argues that situational factors activate “surprising dispositions” in each of us, such as a disposition to “harm others in order to obey the instructions of a legitimate authority” (activated in the Milgram experiments) or to help others in order to alleviate embarrassment (activated in the bathroom experiment) (Miller, 2016b : p. 61).

Counter-intuitive as it might seem, the thesis that virtues and vices are rare was a relatively mainstream position in the ancient and medieval worlds. Aristotle, for instance, took for granted that the virtues are rare, insisting that “the many… do not abstain from bad acts because of their baseness but through fear of punishment” ( 1934 : 1179b7–13; Curzer, 2012 : p. 333). And, as Thomas Osborne notes, “Following Aristotle, Thomas [Aquinas] thinks although some agents are virtuous and others are vicious, there are many agents who are neither. Continent agents act well, but they think about what they should not do because their desires are disordered. Incontinent agents act poorly, but they are generally aware of what they should do” (Osborne, 2014 : p. 77, cf. Aquinas 1953: q. 3, art. 9, ad 7).

Why then has the situationist literature struck such a nerve among contemporary moral philosophers, many of whom are reluctant to take refuge, with Aristotle and Aquinas, in the rarity of the virtues as a response to situationism? A key factor in motivating the situationist debates is perhaps the democratic and egalitarian convictions of most philosophers in the modern West. These convictions come to the surface of Robert Adams’s seminal contribution to this debate: “If I do not adopt [the rarity response to situationism], that is because I believe it is important to find moral excellence in imperfect human lives and because I disagree with ancient views about the kind of integration human virtue can and should have” ( 2006 : p. 119).

Whatever the precise motives for their reluctance, some social psychologists and philosophers alike have nonetheless reasonably cautioned against over-interpreting the results of situationist experiments. Further consideration of the data and results of the empirical research can once again help guide philosophical reflection. In an important meta-analysis of 286 experimental studies of helping behavior, for instance, Lefevor et al. ( 2017 ) observed that, while there is substantial evidence that situational factors influence rates of helping, those factors can only explain part of the differences across individuals. So, while “there was a significant difference in the odds of helping between experimental and control groups (OR = 2.25, k  = 286, 95% CI [2.08, 2.43], z  = 20.41, p  < 0.001)” (indicating that situational factors played an important role in shaping helping behavior), roughly 42% of participants across all control groups still engaged in helping behavior without any specifiable situational prompt. Moreover, even in experimental settings designed to discourage helping behavior (e.g., the unhelpful bystander, the hurrying authority figure), roughly 39% of participants still helped, compared with 58% of participants in the control groups (Levefor et al., 2017 : pp. 240–43). Situational factors clearly influence helping behavior, but by no means determine it.

This sort of mixed result is standard in the situationist literature—recall the aforementioned finding that the call to prayer increased Muslim shopkeepers’ charitable giving to 100%, but did so from a relatively high floor of 59% (cf. p. 17 above). While situational factors or the “surprising dispositions” they activate matter a great deal, they are not the whole story; the experimental evidence for helping behaviors suggests that situations and personal traits—whether an evolved disposition to help conspecifics, a developed virtue of benevolence, or something in-between—both contribute to observed patterns of morally significant behaviors such as helping or charitable giving. Owen Flanagan sums up the implications of these mixed findings as follows: “There are dispositions and there are situations. They interact in complex ways” (2016: p. 49).

The data that have come out of experimental psychology on character and virtue has contributed to our understanding of the prevalence and distribution of the virtues and has informed a lively philosophical debate about the place of the virtues, and of moral character more broadly, within human action. Philosophical and theological reflection on the topic of how to cultivate virtue has tended to rely heavily on a given author’s own experiences or observations (Doris, 1998 : p. 512; Healy, 2014 : pp. 73–99). The social sciences can provide a helpful supplement to anecdotal experience by documenting and describing representative distributions of patterns and behaviors. (For a largely successful interaction along these lines, cf. the essays collected in Snow, 2014 ). More broadly, the empirical social sciences can contribute to, and supplement, knowledge in ways that are useful for reflection and scholarship within the humanities.

Corroborating or disconfirming philosophical and theological claims: religion and public health

Besides furnishing grist for the humanistic mill, the social sciences can also provide evidence for or against a range of empirical claims that humanists are wont to make. For instance, students of religion, both within and without religious communities, naturally take an interest in the effects of various religious practices (e.g., attending corporate worship, communal fellowship and support, the confession of sin, private prayer and Scripture reading, etc.) not only on the believer’s eternal destiny but also on flourishing in the present. For example, Miroslav Volf’s Flourishing ( 2015 ) offers a thoughtful treatment of the ways in which a life of faith can become a pathway to flourishing. Volf emphasizes that each of the great world religions (e.g., Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.) “teaches that we live our ordinary lives well when we have a purpose that transcends the goods of ordinary life and when this purpose regulates care for the goods of ordinary life” ( 2015 : p. 72).

World religions, then, predict that their followers will generally experience not only transcendent or eternal flourishing, but also “ordinary flourishing” (Volf, 2015 : p. 44). This prediction, however, is in deep tension, Volf notes, with the contention of some students of religion, that, far from upholding the goods of ordinary life, “religion poisons everything” ( 2015 : p. 76, quoting Hitchens, 2007 ). Volf in fact partially concedes this objection, noting, “Religions have a genuine and indispensable gift to give, but they often get corrupted; they malfunction, and the gift turns into poison” ( 2015 : p. 76). These malfunctions can produce religious hypocrites or violent zealots, but in each case, Volf cautions, we must remember that abuses do not abrogate a thing’s proper use ( 2015 : pp. 76–77).

It is of course true that religious communities often betray their own teachings and best aspirations, and true as well that religious practices are vulnerable to “characteristic damage,” the vices to which their virtues leave them vulnerable (cf. Winner, 2018 : 14 et passim ). Nonetheless, Volf’s discussion of this issue leaves an interesting and important question hanging, namely: how does religious practice affect “ordinary flourishing” in general , rather than in its ideals and in its deformations? Without a clear answer to this question, Volf hasn’t refuted the “New Atheists’” challenge so much as dodged it.

Volf’s silence on this point is particularly striking, given that there is a large and growing empirical literature (mostly from Western contexts) on the relation of religious practice to human flourishing. Let’s distinguish, with Volf, among three domains of flourishing: “life being led well” (a virtuous or moral life, we might say); “life going well” (a prosperous, healthy, productive life); and “life feeling good” (a life of subjective happiness, joy, pleasure, etc.) ( 2015 : p. 75). What is that state of the empirical evidence for the bearing of religious practice on each of them?

First, regarding “a life well led,” a great deal of evidence suggests that religious belief and practice generally make participants less prone to delinquency and crime (Johnson et al., 2001 ; Johnson, 2011 ), fairer and more honest (Tan et al., 2008 ; Ruffle and Sossis, 2006 ; Haidt, 2012 : pp. 308–309), and more generous in their dealings with others (Brooks, 2007 ). Footnote 10 Second, regarding “a life going well,” the data is again abundant, and its trend is clear: those who attend religious services at least weekly are about 34% less likely to binge drink than those who never attend (Chen et al., 2020a ), while adolescents who attend services regularly have a 33% lower risk of illegal drug use and a 40% lower risk of contracting an STD compared to never-attenders (Chen and VanderWeele, 2018 ). Regular attenders are also about 50% less likely to divorce (Li et al., 2018 ), 27% less likely to become depressed, and five times less likely to commit suicide than non-attenders (Li et al., 2016a ; VanderWeele et al., 2016 ), and, in fact, 33% less likely to die (over sixteen years of follow-up) than non-attenders (Chen et al., 2020b ; Li et al., 2016b ). Finally, there is strong evidence that religious participation contributes to a “life that feels good,” a happy or joyful life: religious practitioners consistently report higher levels of meaning and purpose in their lives than non-practitioners (Chen et al., 2020a ), as well as higher levels of overall life satisfaction (Lim and Putnam, 2010 ). While questions of causality and directionality are almost always open to dispute, the research on this topic has become increasingly rigorous, employing data over time and principles of causal inference to evaluate evidence (cf. VanderWeele, 2017 ; Koenig et al., 2024 ; Fruehwirth et al., 2019 ; Giles et al., 2023 ).

Of course, many of these findings may well generalize across religions, including “primary” or “pre-Axial Age” religions. (On the transition from primary or archaic religion to “secondary,” “world,” or “axial age” religion, cf. esp. Jaspers, 1953 ; Bellah, 2017 ).

Belief in a post-mortem final judgment according to one’s deeds, for instance, seems to have originated in Middle Kingdom Egypt (cf. The Egyptian Book of the Dead 1895 : ch. 125; Assmann, 2005 : Kindle loc. 1471–75), where it appears already to have served to discipline the lives of believers anticipating it (Assmann, 2005 : Kindle loc. 1614).

Even religious practices that rightly horrify us today might have once been a source of Durkheimian social cohesion. When King Mesha of Moab sacrificed his eldest son on the walls of his besieged city, for instance, his troops apparently flew into a frenzy which turned the tide of the Israelite advance (cf. 2 Kings 3:26–27). Indeed, it seems reasonable to think that much of what social scientists or theologians alike study under the rubric of “religion” is emphatically a natural phenomenon, which unites us to one another by uniting each of us to some conception of divinity or transcendence (cf. Haidt, 2012 : p. 303).

World religions typically have their own internal strategies for relating religion as a “natural” phenomenon to their own claims to a relatively fuller measure of the truth of things. Mahayana Buddhists, for instance, characteristically regard spiritual traditions other than the Dharma as the “compassionate skillful means” employed by the Buddha in one of his many “transformation bodies” so as to nudge wayward sentient beings closer to ultimate truth (Williams 2008 : p. 181). For the Christian theologian Karl Barth, by contrast, “natural” religion is “sublated” (in Hegel’s sense of a development that at once preserves and transforms its predecessor) in the rites revealed to Israel and brought to their fullness in Christ (Barth, 2007 : Kindle loc. 887; cf. Hegel, 1878 : 1.4.3).

The empirical social sciences can help contribute evidence towards corroborating claims that theologians or philosophers may take as self-evident. In some cases, the data may play out as expected, but in other cases, this may not be so. Footnote 11 Often, however, empirical research is needed to confirm or challenge intuitive but ultimately empirically testable convictions. Many confessional thinkers might well be less than enthusiastic about social scientists’ accounts of religious community, either because of their apparent reduction of grace to nature, or because the results do not confirm some of their prior convictions. Nonetheless, we think that these tensions provide an important opportunity for deepened reflection on their part.

Establishing effective interventions: how can we promote forgiveness?

For our final category of social-scientific influence on the humanities, let’s consider an area in which there is some agreement about a desired goal, but a need for greater clarity in how to bring it about. For instance, many agree that forgiveness—understood as the replacement of one wronged of ill-will for good-will towards the offender—is an important good both for individuals and for their broader communities (VanderWeele, 2018 ). Importantly, forgiveness in this sense is not to be confused with condoning the offense, reconciling with the offender, or even foregoing punishment for the offense (Worthington, 2013 ).

With regard to its desirability, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that being forgiving is associated with improved outcomes across a range of public health measures, including, for example, less depression and less anxiety, and possibly better physical health (Wade et al., 2014 ; Toussaint et al., 2015 ; Long et al., 2020 ). For religious believers across many traditions, forgiveness is a spiritual duty; Christians, for instance, regularly pray that God would “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” (Matt. 6:12). Finally, many today also recognize that forgiveness—or related concepts such as “reconciliation”—is of deep social and political relevance in societies seeking to heal from past traumas, whether in post-Communist Balkan republics (Volf, 1996 ), post-apartheid South Africa (Forster, 2019 ), or post-genocide Rwanda and Burundi (Katangole and Rice, 2008 ).

Nonetheless, despite their crucial role in fostering forgiveness at a societal level, there is little agreement among religious or political leaders about how best to pursue the aim of promoting forgiveness. Recent psychological research, however, has produced a number of experimentally validated interventions to help people become more forgiving. These draw on decades of work in clinical psychology on the processes by which people come to forgive, with different models outlining analogous stages on the path to forgiveness. Despite their differences in emphasis and ordering, for instance, both Enright’s Process Model and Worthington’s REACH model underscore the importance of forgiveness by uncovering negative feelings about the offense, deciding to pursue forgiveness for a specific instance, developing empathy for the offending person, and maintaining one’s forgiveness over time (Enright and Fitzgibbons, 2000 ; Worthington, 2013 ). The development of these models draws upon insights from psychology and constitutes a contribution of the social sciences to a topic that is of deep interest to humanists.

Numerous randomized trials now indicate that interventions based on these models are effective not only in promoting forgiveness, but also in decreasing depression and anxiety, and increasing hope (Wade et al., 2014 ). These interventions have been shown to be effective with groups as diverse as adult incest survivors, parents who have adopted special needs children, and inpatients struggling with alcohol and drug addiction (Freedman and Enright, 1996 ; Baskin et al., 2011 ; Lin et al., 2004 ). These forgiveness interventions have also been simplified into a do-it-yourself workbook format, with evidence now of effectiveness in promoting forgiveness, decreasing depression and anxiety, and increasing flourishing (Harper et al., 2014 ; Ho et al., 2023 ).

There could be substantial societal-wide potential to employ these interventions on a population-wide basis, with the expectation of not only promoting forgiveness but also important health outcomes within communities (VanderWeele, 2018 ). Given that we have acknowledged above, however, that many people act well due only to a fear of punishment, some might worry that successfully increasing forgiveness in society might have the unintended side-effect of encouraging more bad behavior. Footnote 12 In part, this concern highlights the need for conceptual clarity about the construct being promoted; if, as we suggested above, following Worthington ( 2013 ), offering forgiveness is not inconsistent with punishing the wrongdoer (say, with an eye to the wrongdoer’s reform and amendment of life, or to the deterrence of future wrongdoing), then there is no reason in principle that offenders should perceive an increase in forgiveness as a license for further bad behavior. Nonetheless, this too is ultimately an empirical matter, which would certainly merit close attention in an effort to promote forgiveness using the kinds of intervention discussed above.

This is of course but one example, but similar intervention development and evaluation routinely takes place for a variety of health and economic outcomes. Moreover, further work could be done to employ these approaches for intervention development for various other psychological, social, and even spiritual goods. The social sciences thus clearly have and can play an important role in the development and evaluation of the effectiveness of interventions for achieving various agreed-upon goods.

In this paper, we have considered various ways in which disciplines can contribute to and enrich the understanding of knowledge by drawing upon knowledge and perspectives from other disciplines. In particular, we have proposed that the humanities contribute to the social sciences by (1) identifying new directions and scope for their inquiry; (2) providing conceptual clarity for constructs that the social sciences elect to study; and (3) enriching & clarifying the interpretation of empirical results. In the reverse direction, the social sciences can help (4) furnish new data for humanistic reflection; (5) confirm (or challenge) claims from the humanities; and (6) develop and assess interventions for achieving the goods highlighted by humanistic inquiry.

In principle, however, all of these modes may work in either direction. Fully developing this suggestion would require another paper, but it is nevertheless worthwhile to briefly highlight some examples. First, it is not only the case that ideas from the humanities can motivate new topics of inquiry within the sciences, but the reverse unquestionably takes place as well. One arena in which this is clearest concerns ethics. New technologies emerging from scientific advances, such as genetic manipulation or in the rise of social media, present a host of new ethical considerations for which the humanities are needed to provide reflection and insight. Here science itself prompts new scholarship and inquiry within the humanities. Second, some conceptual distinctions arising from the social sciences have arguably helped provide conceptual clarity in the humanities. One such example may be a distinction in the clinical psychology literature drawn between “decisional forgiveness” and “emotional forgiveness,” the former consisting of replacing ill-will towards the offender with good-will and the latter being more of an affective state, the replacing of negative feelings and emotions towards the offender with positive emotions (cf. Worthington, 2013 ). Characteristically decisional forgiveness precedes emotional forgiveness. The distinction, arising from the social science research on this topic, is arguably helpful in theological or philosophical contexts in making sense of the notion of a “command” to forgive (cf. Lk. 17:3–4, Col. 3:14). One’s emotions are not fully within one’s control but if the command to forgive is understood as pertaining to decisional forgiveness, such commands become coherent. In this case, a conceptual distinction from the social sciences sheds light on issues of theological interpretation.

Third, while it will often be ideas and scholarship from the humanities that enrich the interpretation of the sciences, sometimes this too can operate in the reverse direction. For instance, Christian theology has traditionally been much concerned with the nature of human distinctiveness, often thematized in terms of the nature of the “image of God” which Genesis 1:26–28 suggests is a unique property of human beings. However, recent advances in evolutionary psychology and comparative primatology have greatly enriched our empirical understanding of how humans compare to our nearest evolutionary relatives. Some researchers, such as the primatologist Frans de Waal ( 1996 ), emphasize continuity, highlighting apes’ remarkable capacities for social emotions and instrumental reasoning; others, such as Noam Chomsky and Robert Berwick or Michael Tomasello, emphasize discontinuity, highlighting the absence of non-human primates of hierarchically ordered language or “joint intentionality,” each of which is key ingredients in our species’ sui generis capacities for social learning and cultural transmission (Chomsky and Berwick, 2016 ; Tomasello, 2018 ; cf. also Henrich, 2015 ). Attending to the work of these scientists would greatly enrich theological reflection on the image of God, as well as other sub-topics within theological anthropology.

Fourth, knowledge from the humanities might help supplement that which is acquired in the social sciences. For example, Muthukrishna et al. have argued that psychology needs to in part reconstitute itself as “a historical science” so as to understand “past processes, environments, and constraints that led to [present-day] psychology” ( 2021 : p. 717). In such cases, historical knowledge may contribute to advances within the social sciences. Fifth, the humanities themselves might sometimes challenge claims from scientific disciplines in part by showing that certain claims themselves are not employing the relevant concepts appropriately, as is perhaps taking place concerning certain controversies within neuroscience concerning mental phenomena such as intentionality or qualia (Bennett and Hacker, 2013 ). Sixth, the humanities themselves can sometimes give rise to interventions to improve human well-being. Spiritual practices arising from the richness of the world’s religious traditions might provide powerful approaches to improving human well-being (Yaden et al., 2020 ). While the empirical evaluation of these practices requires tools from the social sciences, the form of the interventions being studied might well be taken from insights from the humanities.

While specialization has undoubtedly led to innumerable advances—advances that simply could not have been achieved without the development of specialized expertise—there is also the danger of specialization leading to knowledge that is too fragmentary. The various academic disciplines have become estranged, and the time is ripe for reconciliation. We have proposed, in this paper, some concrete ways in which this might occur. This is only a preliminary sketch, but we hope that further work along these lines might contribute to a genuine synthesis of the humanities and social sciences.

Data availability

Data sharing is also not applicable to this research as no data were generated or analyzed.

In philosophy, cf. MacIntyre’s ( 1982 ) treatment of the destructive effects on both disciplines of the modern divorce between ethics and the philosophy of mind. An analogous lament from within the theological disciplines can be found in Hays and Davis ( 2003 ): xv: “What we were doing…was assembling a group of fifteen specialists to function corporately as a ‘Complete Theologian.’”

For the Kantian source-text, cf. Kant, 1998 : A 51/B 75. Alfano’s book offers a helpful recent overview of the current state of philosophical engagement with the social sciences, to which might also be added (Flanagan, 2016 ; Miller, 2013 ).

“Even though an optimist may believe that ‘things will work out,’ that optimist may lack the pathways cognitions important in reaching one’s goals. Therefore, an optimist may be stuck when blocked from a goal, whereas the high-hope person should produce new routes when the original path to a goal is blocked” ( 1995 : p. 356).

As other examples of the use of insights from the philosophical and theological literature for the purposes of measurement development see Hanson and VanderWeele ( 2021 ) on meaning and purpose and VanderWeele ( 2019 ) on suffering.

For Dilthey, these disciplines included “history, political economy, the sciences of law and of the state, the studies of religion, of literature and poetry, of art and music, of philosophical world-view, as well as the theory and conceptual cognition of the historical process” ( 2002 : pp. 91, 107, 140).

Cf. the “Sexual Desire Inventory-2,” which defines “sexual desire” as “interest in or wish for sexual activity,” in turn defined as “touching [a partner’s] genitals, giving or receiving oral stimulation, engaging in intercourse, etc.” (Spector et al., 1996 ). So too, Toledano and Pfaus introduce their “Sexual Desire and Arousal Inventory” by noting, “sexual desire can be defined as ‘wanting’ or ‘craving’ sexual activity or fantasy” (Toledano 2006).

For a clear overview of the state of the debate, see esp. Miller ( 2020 ). Several of the studies cited in the following three paragraphs are discussed by Miller.

As Miller notes, somewhat more ethical variations on Milgram’s experiments, assessing the human propensity to harm others at the behest of authority figures, have been replicated many times (2016: pp. 82–84).

For a dissection, cf. Singal, 2021 : pp. 241–48.

Charitable giving is about 3.5x higher among service attendees than among never-attenders (Putnam and Campbell, 2010 : 461; Brooks 2007 ; Haidt, 2012 : pp. 308–311).

For one such example related to the present discussion, while there is evidence that religious service attendance is associated with lower depression incidence and suicide, the evidence, in Western contexts at least, is that the effects of attendance on anxiety, at least on average, are small (Koenig et al., 2024 ). This may seem counter-intuitive as many may think that if religion is to do anything positive it perhaps brings a sense of peace. The empirical research suggests that while this may be so for some, it may in fact increase anxiety for others, perhaps out of a sense of need to conform to moral norms, fear of failure, or an additional set of obligations, so that the average effect of religious service attendance on anxiety is slight.

Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this concern.

Adams R (2006) A theory of virtue: excellence in being for the good. Oxford University, New York

Book   Google Scholar  

Alfano M (2014) Character as moral fiction. Cambridge University, New York

Google Scholar  

Alfano M (2016) Moral psychology: an introduction. Polity, Boston

Annas J (1993) The morality of happiness. Oxford University Press, New York

Snow N (ed.) (2014) Cultivating virtue: perspectives from philosophy, theology, and psychology. Oxford University Press, New York

Aquinas T (1888 [1272-1274]). Summa Theologiae. Textum Leoninum Romae

Aristotle (1934) Nicomachean ethics. Trans. Rackham H. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

Assmann J (2005) Death and salvation in ancient Egypt. Trans. David Lorton. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY

Barth K (2007) On religion: the revelation of god as the sublimation of religion. Trans. Garrett Green. Bloomsbury, New York

Baskin TW, Rhody M, Schoolmeesters S, Ellingson C (2011) Supporting special-needs adoptive couples: assessing an intervention to enhance forgiveness, increase marital satisfaction, and prevent depression ψ. Counsel Psychol 39(7):933–955. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011000010397554

Article   Google Scholar  

Bellah R (2017) Religion in human evolution: from the Paleolithic to the axial age. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

Bennett MR, Hacker PMS (2013) Philosophical foundations of neuroscience. John Wiley & Sons

Brooks A (2007) Who really cares? The surprising truth about compassionate conservatism. Basic Books, New York

Budge EAW (1895) The Egyptian Book of the Dead: the Papyrus of Ani in the British Museum; the Egyptian Text with interlinear transliteration and translation, a running translation, introduction, etc. (1895). Trans. Budge EAW; Cosimo, New York

Cantril H (1965) The pattern of human concerns. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ

Chen Y, VanderWeele TJ (2018) Associations of religious upbringing with subsequent health and well-being from adolescence to young adulthood: an outcome-wide analysis. Am J Epidemiol 187:2355–2364. https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwy142/5094534

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Chen Y, Kim ES, VanderWeele TJ (2020a) Religious service attendance and subsequent health and well-being throughout adulthood: evidence from three prospective cohorts. Int J Epidemiol 49:2030–2040. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyaa120/5892419

Article   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Chen Y, Koh HK, Kawachi I, Botticelli M, VanderWeele TJ (2020b) Religious service attendance and deaths related to drugs, alcohol, and suicide among US health care professionals. JAMA Psychiatry 77(7):737–744. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2020.0175

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Chomsky N, Berwick R (2016) Why only us?: language and evolution. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Curzer H (2012) Aristotle and the virtues. Oxford University, New York

Dahlsgaard K, Peterson C, Seligman ME (2005) Shared virtue: the convergence of valued human strengths across culture and history. Rev Gen Psychol 9(3):203–213

Darley J, Batson C (1973) ‘From Jerusalem to Jericho:’ a study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior. J Personal Soc Psychol 27:100–108. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0034449

Descartes R (1989) The passions of the soul. Trans. S. Voss. Hackett, Indianapolis, [1949]

Dickinson E (1983) ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers. In: Johnson T (ed). The complete poems of Emily Dickinson. The Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA

Doris J (2002) Lack of character: personality and moral behavior. Cambridge University Press, New York

Doris JM (1998) Persons, situations, and virtue ethics. Nous 32(4):504–530

Duhaime EP (2015) Is the call to prayer a call to cooperate? A field experiment on the impact of religious salience on prosocial behavior. Judgm Decis Mak 10(6):593–596. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-54494-007

Enright RD, Fitzgibbons RP (2000) Helping clients forgive: an empirical guide for resolving anger and restoring hope. American Psychological Association

Flanagan O (2016) The geography of morals. Oxford University Press, New York

Forster D (2019) The (Im)possibility of forgiveness: an empirical intercultural bible reading of Matthew 18.15-35. Wipf & Stock, Eugene, OR

Frankl V (1989) Man’s search for meaning, rev. ed. Washington Square Press, New York, [1959]

Freedman SR, Enright RD (1996) Forgiveness as an intervention goal with incest survivors. J Consult Clin Psychol 64(5):983–992. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.64.5.983

Article   CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Fruehwirth JC, Iyer S, Zhang A (2019) Religion and depression in adolescence. J Polit Econ 127(3):1178–1209

Giles T, Hungerman DM, Oostrom T (2023) “ Opiates of the masses? Deaths of despair and the decline of American religion” (No. w30840). National Bureau of Economic Research

Gould SJ (1997) Nonoverlapping magisteria. Nat Hist 106(2):16–22

Haidt J (2012) The righteous mind: why good people are divided by religion and politics. Random House, New York

Hanson JA, VanderWeele TJ (2021) The comprehensive measure of meaning: psychological and philosophical foundations. In: Lee M, Kubzansky LD, VanderWeele TJ (eds.) Measuring well-being: interdisciplinary perspectives from the social sciences and the humanities. Oxford University Press, New York

Harman G (1999) Moral philosophy meets social psychology: virtue ethics and the fundamental attribution error. Proc Aristotelian Soc 99:315–31. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4545312

Harper Q, Worthington Jr EL, Griffin BJ, Lavelock CR, Hook JN, Vrana SR, Greer CL (2014) Efficacy of a workbook to promote forgiveness: a randomized controlled trial with university students. J Clin Psychol 70(12):1158–1169. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.22079

Hays R, Davis E (2003) The art of reading scripture. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI

Healy N (2014) Hauerwas: a (very) critical introduction. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI

Hegel GWF (1878 [1812]). Wissenschaft der Logik. Erster Band. Die objektive Logik (1812/13). Friedrich Hogemann und Walter Jaeschke (eds). Hamburg

Helliwell J (2021) Measuring and using happiness to support public policies. In: Lee M, Kubzansky LD, VanderWeele TJ (eds.) Measuring well-being: interdisciplinary perspectives from the social sciences and the humanities. Oxford University Press, New York

Henrich J (2015) The secret of our success: how culture is driving evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ

Henrich J (2020) The WEIRDest people in the world. Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, New York

Hitchens C (2007) God is not great. Atlantic Books, New York

Ho, MY, Worthington, E, Cowden, R, Bechara, AO, Chen, ZJ, Gunatirin, EY, Joynt, S, Khalanskyi, VV, Korzhov, H, Kurniati, NMT, Rodriguez, N, Salnykova, A, Shtanko, L, Tymchenko, S, Voytenko, VL, Zulkaida, A, Mathur, M and VanderWeele, T (2023, March 3). International REACH forgiveness intervention: a multi-site randomized controlled trial. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/8qzgw

Ioannidis JPA, Baas J, Klavans R, Boyack KW (2019) A standardized citation metrics author database annotated for scientific field. PLoS Biol 17(8):e3000384. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000384

Article   CAS   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Isen A, Levin P (1972) Effect of feeling good on helping: cookies and kindness. J Personal Soc Psychol 21:384–388. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0032317

Article   CAS   Google Scholar  

Jaspers K (1953) The origin and goal of history. Trans. Michael Bullock. Routledge & Keegan Paul, London

Johnson BR (2011) More god, less crime: why faith matters and how it could matter more. Templeton Press, West Conshohocken, PA

Johnson BR, Jang SJ, Larson DB, Li SD (2001) Does adolescent religious commitment matter? A reexamination of the effects of religiosity on delinquency. J Res Crime Delinq 38(1):22–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022427801038001002

Kant I (1998 [1781]) The critique of pure reason. Guyer P, Wood A (eds). Cambridge University Press, New York

Katangole E, Rice C (2008) Reconciling all things: a Christian vision for justice, peace, and healing. InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL

Keats J (1820) Lamia, Isabella, the eve of St. Agnes, and other poems. Taylor & Hessey, London

Koenig H, VanderWeele TJ, Peteet JR (2024) Handbook on religion and health, 3rd edition;. Oxford University Press, New York

Latané B, Rodin J (1969) A lady in distress: Inhibiting effects of friends and strangers on bystander intervention. J Exp Soc Psychol 5(2):189–202. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(69)90046-8

Lefevor GT, Fowers B, Ahn S, Lang SF, Cohen LM (2017) To what degree do situational influences explain spontaneous helping behaviour? A meta-analysis. Eur Rev Soc Psychol 28(1):227–256. https://doi.org/10.1080/10463283.2017.1367529

Li S, Stampfer MJ, Williams DR, VanderWeele TJ (2016b) Association of religious service attendance with mortality among women. JAMA Intern Med 176(6):777–785

Li S, Okereke OI, Chang SC, Kawachi I, VanderWeele TJ (2016a) Religious service attendance and lower depression among women—a prospective cohort study. Ann Behav Med 50(6):876–884

Li S, Kubzansky L, VanderWeele TJ (2018) Religious service attendance, divorce, and remarriage among U.S. nurses in mid and late life. PLoS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0207778

Lim C, Putnam RD (2010) Religion, social networks, and life satisfaction. Am Sociol Rev. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122410386686

Lin WF, Mack D, Enright RD, Krahn D, Baskin TW (2004) Effects of forgiveness therapy on anger, mood, and vulnerability to substance use among inpatient substance-dependent clients. J Consult Clin Psychol 72(6 Dec):1114–21. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.72.6.1114 . PMID: 15612857

Long KNG, Worthington EL, VanderWeele TJ et al. (2020) Forgiveness of others and subsequent health and well-being in mid-life: a longitudinal study on female nurses. BMC Psychol 8:104. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-020-00470-w

Dilthey W (2002 [1910]) The formation of the historical world in the human sciences: selected works, Vol. III. Makkreel R, Rodi R (eds). Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ

MacIntyre A (1982) How moral agents became ghosts or why the history of ethics diverged from that of the philosophy of mind. Synthese 53.2:295–312

McDowell J (1996) Mind and world. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

Midgley M (2005) The human heart and other organs.” The essential Mary Midgley. Midgley D (ed). Routledge, New York

Milgram S (1974) Obedience to authority. Harper & Row, New York

Miller C (2013) Character and moral psychology. Oxford University Press, New York

Miller C (2016b) Should Christians be worried about situationist claims in psychology and philosophy? Faith Philos 33(1):48–73. https://doi.org/10.5840/faithphil20161554

Miller C (2016a) The character gap. Oxford University Press, New York

Miller C (2020) Empirical approaches to moral character. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ( https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-character-empirical/ )

Morson GS, Shapiro M (2017) Cents and sensibility: what economists can learn from the humanities. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

Muthukrishna, Henrich MJ, Slingerland E (2021) Psychology as a historical science. Annu Rev Psychol 72(1):717–749. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-082820-111436

Nagel T (1989) The view from nowhere. Oxford University Press, New York

Ng V, Tay L (2020) Lost in translation: the construct representation of character virtues. Perspect Psychol Sci 15(2):309–326

Osborne T (2014) Human action in Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. Catholic University of America Press, Washington, DC

Putnam R, Campbell D (2010) American grace: how religion divides and unites us. Simon and Schuster, New York

Ruffle BJ, Sosis R (2006) Cooperation and the in-group-out-group bias: a field test on Israeli kibbutz members and city residents. J Econ Behav Organ 60(2):147–163. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2004.07.007

Ryff C, Boylan JM, Kirsch JA (2021) Hedonic and eudaimonic well-being In: Lee M, Kubzansky LD, VanderWeele TJ (eds) Measuring well-being: interdisciplinary perspectives from the social sciences and the humanities. Oxford University Press, New York

Ryff CD (1989) Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. J Pers Soc Psychol 57(6):1069

Ryff CD, Keyes, CLM (1995) The structure of psychological well-being revisited. J Pers Soc Psychol 69(4):719

Scruton R (2006) Sacrament and sacrilege. In: Elshtain JB, George R (eds) The meaning of marriage. Scepter, New York

Scruton R (2014) The soul of the world. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ

Sellars W (1963) Empiricism and the philosophy of mind. Science, perception and reality. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, pp. 127–196

Singal J (2021) The quick fix: why fad psychology can’t cure our social ills. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, New York

Snyder CR (1995) Conceptualizing, measuring, and nurturing hope. J Couns Dev 73:355–360. 10.1002/j.1556-6676.1995.tb01764.x

Spector IP, Carey MP, Steinberg L (1996) The sexual desire inventory: development, factor, structure, and evidence of reliability. J Sex Marital Ther 22:175–190. https://www.midss.org/content/sexual-desire-inventory-2-sdi-2

Symons X, VanderWeele TJ (2023) Aristotelian flourishing and contemporary philosophical theories of wellbeing. J Happiness Stud (forthcoming)

Tan, Jonathan HW, Vogel C (2008) Religion and trust: an experimental study. J Econ Psychol 29(6):832–848. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2008.03.002.2008

Toledano R, Pfaus J (2006) Original research—Outcomes assessment: the sexual arousal and desire inventory (SADI): a multidimensional scale to assess subjective sexual arousal and desire. J Sex Med 3(5):853–877. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1743-6109.2006.00293.x.09

Tomasello M (2018) Becoming human: a theory of ontogeny. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

Toussaint LL, Worthington EL, Williams DR (2015) Forgiveness and health: scientific evidence and theories relating forgiveness to better health. Springer, Netherlands

VanderWeele TJ (2017) Religion and health: a synthesis. In: Balboni MJ, Peteet JR (eds.) Spirituality and religion within the culture of medicine: from evidence to practice. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, pp. 357–401

VanderWeele TJ (2022) The importance, opportunities, and challenges of empirically assessing character for the promotion of flourishing. J Educ 202(2):170–180. https://doi.org/10.1177/00220574211026905

VanderWeele TJ, Li S, Tsai AC, Kawachi I (2016) Association between religious service attendance and lower suicide rates among US women. JAMA Psychiatry 73(8):845–851

VanderWeele TJ (2018). Is forgiveness a public health issue? Am J Public Health 108, 2. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2017.304210

VanderWeele TJ (2019) Suffering and response: directions in empirical research. Soc Sci Med 224:58–66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.01.041

Volf M (1996) Exclusion and embrace. Abingdon, Nashville

Volf M (2015) Flourishing: why we need religion in a globalized world. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT

de Waal F (1996) Good natured: the origins of right and wrong in humans and other animals. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

Wade NG, Hoyt WT, Kidwell JE, Worthington Jr EL (2014) Efficacy of psychotherapeutic interventions to promote forgiveness: a meta-analysis. J Consult Clin Psychol 82(1):154–170. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035268

Weber M (2004 [1917]). Science as a vocation. In: The vocation lectures. Trans. Livingstone R. Hackett

Williams P (2008) Mahayana Buddhism: the doctrinal foundations. New York: Routledge

Winner L (2018) The dangers of Christian practice: on wayward gifts, characteristic damage, and Sin. Yale University Press, New Haven

Worthington EL (2013) Forgiveness and reconciliation: theory and application. Taylor & Francis, New York, NY

Yaden DB, Zhao Y, Peng K, Newberg AB (2020) Rituals and practices in world religions. Springer International Publishing

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

The Human Flourishing Program, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Brendan Case

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; The Human Flourishing Program, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Tyler J. VanderWeele

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

Both authors contributed to drafting and revising the submitted manuscript, and to subsequent revisions based on the results of peer review.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Brendan Case .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Ethical approval

This article does not report new results of any studies with human participants performed by the authors, so ethical approval is not applicable.

Informed consent

This article does not report new results of any studies with human participants performed by the authors, so informed consent is not applicable.

Additional information

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Case, B., VanderWeele, T.J. Integrating the humanities and the social sciences: six approaches and case studies. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 231 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-02684-4

Download citation

Received : 07 July 2022

Accepted : 18 January 2024

Published : 08 February 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-02684-4

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Key concepts in humanities and social sciences

RELATED PAPERS

Arvin Arvin

Journal Institute of Croatian History

Lovorka Coralic

Francisco Bastos

American Journal of Criminal Justice

Susan McGraugh

Erum Chowdhry

Robert Moffitt

KAGAKU KOGAKU RONBUNSHU

Masayuki Horio

Turkiye Klinikleri Journal of Medical Sciences

Revista Brasileira de Reprodução Animal

thaise paes fernandes

Protein Science

Diana Tovar

Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining

Joseph Kwarteng

Journal of the Japan Institute of Energy

Anita Ramli

Revista De Ciencia Y Tecnologia

Maynor Carrillo

Psychological Medicine

PLoS Genetics

Didier Devys

Murat Küçükşen

Indian Journal of Animal Research

Journal of Physical Activity and Health

Niamh Murphy

Anne Philip

2004 International Conference on Image Processing, 2004. ICIP '04.

Anna Ābeltiņa

Applied Clay Science

Marta Valaskova

tufhfgd hfdfsd

See More Documents Like This

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

File : Flag of Elektrostal (Moscow oblast).svg

File history, file usage on commons, file usage on other wikis.

Original file ‎ (SVG file, nominally 603 × 393 pixels, file size: 39 KB)

Structured data

Items portrayed in this file, copyright status, copyrighted, copyright license, creative commons attribution-sharealike 2.0 generic, creative commons attribution-sharealike 1.0 generic, gnu free documentation license, version 1.2 or later, creative commons attribution-sharealike 2.5 generic, creative commons attribution-sharealike 3.0 unported, source of file, original creation by uploader, 31 august 2007.

• SVG flags of cities and villages of Moscow Oblast
• Culture of Elektrostal
• License migration redundant
• CC-BY-SA-3.0,2.5,2.0,1.0
• Self-published work

Navigation menu

• Vehicle Technologies Office
• About the Vehicle Technologies Office
• Technology Areas
• Technology Integration
• Reports and Publications

Office: Vehicle Technologies Office FOA number:  DE-FOA-0003248 Link to apply:  Apply on EERE Exchange FOA Amount: $45,800,000

Today, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced $45.8 million in new funding for projects that will advance research, development, demonstration, and deployment (RDD&D) critical to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector. The funding will drive innovation in equitable clean transportation and is aligned with strategies detailed in the U.S. National Blueprint for Transportation Decarbonization . 

The funding is through DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). Topic areas in the Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO) Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 R&D funding opportunity include:

• Next-generation phosphate-based cathodes.
• Advancing the state of the art for sodium-ion batteries.
• Developing concepts for decreasing greenhouse gas emissions from off-road vehicles such as construction, agriculture, mining, and forestry vehicles.
• Developing and deploying vehicle-to-everything technologies that can lead to meaningful savings at the vehicle and transportation system level.
• Developing high-performance, domestically produced electrical steels (E-steels) for use in electrified powertrains.
• Addressing critical cybersecurity needs for smart and secure electric vehicle charging.

As part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to ensuring the benefits of a clean transportation system are shared equally, the funding seeks the participation of underserved communities and underrepresented groups. Applicants are required to describe how diversity, equity, and inclusion objectives will be incorporated into their project. 

VTO provides a series of funding opportunity announcement (FOA) information session videos , which help applicants understand VTO’s FOA process and requirements. The recently released, Session 3: Tips for a Strong FOA Application, includes best practices for incorporating Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in a project.

Learn more about this and other funding opportunities on VTO’s funding webpage . 

Topic Areas

Topic Area 1: Next-Generation Phosphate-Based Cathodes

This topic area targets the development of phosphate-based cathode materials that surpass the performance of state-of-the-art lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cathode materials, which are currently gaining traction as an alternative low-cost solution. The primary objective of this area of interest is to develop high energy density battery cells containing phosphate-based cathodes at the material and cell level.

Topic Area 2: Na-ion Battery Seedling Projects for Electric Vehicle Applications

While shifting to alternative cathode materials like LFP can alleviate the impact of nickel and cobalt, the impact of lithium has not been adequately addressed. One alternative to lithium is sodium (Na). While there is much promise for Na-ion chemistries, key issues still limit their adoption. This objective of this topic area is to advance the state of the art for Na-ion batteries by solving key challenges for the cathode, anode, or electrolyte through the development of 1 Ah full cells utilizing cell chemistries that are significant advancements over current industry state-of-the-art Na-ion technology.

Topic Area 3: Low-GHG Concepts for Off-Road Vehicles

The objective of this topic area is to develop and validate technology concepts capable of significantly decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, harmful criteria emissions, and total cost of ownership across the entire off-road vehicle sector, including construction, agriculture, mining, forestry, ports, warehouses, etc. Concepts must demonstrate they can meet the unique requirements for off-road vehicles and gain customer acceptance.

Topic Area 4: Saving Energy with Connectivity

Research has shown that vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications can lead to meaningful energy savings at the vehicle and transportation system level by integrating interoperable vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), and vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) communications. The objective of this topic area is to develop and deploy V2X technologies with a focus on the efficiency and convenience of the mobility ecosystem, while reducing transportation’s environmental impacts. Examples could include but are not limited to eco-driving along connected corridors, transit or freight priority, integrated corridor management, or passenger or freight trip-chaining optimization.

Topic Area 5: Domestically Produced Electrical Steels (E-Steels)

The US transportation sector is in a technology revolution where light-duty vehicles are rapidly transitioning from internal combustion engines to electrified powertrains. Although most of the vehicles are produced in the US, many of the powertrain components rely on imports and foreign supply chains. Of particular interest are traction motors and their components. The objective of this topic are is to develop E-Steels meeting properties including frequency, thickness, ductility, cost, and manufacturability. 

Topic Area 6: Cybersecurity for Smart and Secure Electric Vehicle Charging

This topic area is addressing critical cybersecurity needs to address through two subtopics: 

• Subtopic 6.a: Enabling Wide-scale, Cybersecure EV/EVSE Aggregation for Grid Services :  To support the integration of electric vehicles (EVs) and their charging requirements with the electric grid, both government and the private sector have made significant investments in the development of smart charge management (SCM) systems and technologies for EV charging infrastructure. The objective of this subtopic area is to research, develop, and demonstrate systems, technologies, and tools necessary for the cybersecure aggregation of EVs and charging infrastructure to provide widescale, cybersecure grid services.
• Subtopic 6.b: Tools to Assess EV/EVSE/Charging System Cybersecurity Posture and Compliance with Standards and Protocols for Communications, Controls, and Monitoring :   Testing and evaluation of Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE) by DOE national laboratories has clearly indicated a lack of compliance by many vendors with certified and/or regulated EV charging standards and protocols. In addition to creating cybersecurity vulnerabilities, this non-compliance greatly inhibits interoperability, supplier-managed SCM, and right-to-repair. The objective of this subtopic is to research, develop, and validate a suite of tools and associated procedures to comprehensively assess EV/EVSE/charging system compliance with relevant standards and protocols and cybersecurity posture.

Additional Information

• Download the full funding opportunity  on the EERE Exchange website.
• For FOA-specific support, contact  [email protected] . 
• Sign up for the  Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) funding email list  to get notified of new EERE funding opportunities. Also sign up for  VTO’s newsletter to stay current with the latest news.
• Watch the VTO Funding Opportunity Announcement information series webinars.

Help | Advanced Search

Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Title: robust concept erasure using task vectors.

Abstract: With the rapid growth of text-to-image models, a variety of techniques have been suggested to prevent undesirable image generations. Yet, these methods often only protect against specific user prompts and have been shown to allow unsafe generations with other inputs. Here we focus on unconditionally erasing a concept from a text-to-image model rather than conditioning the erasure on the user's prompt. We first show that compared to input-dependent erasure methods, concept erasure that uses Task Vectors (TV) is more robust to unexpected user inputs, not seen during training. However, TV-based erasure can also affect the core performance of the edited model, particularly when the required edit strength is unknown. To this end, we propose a method called Diverse Inversion, which we use to estimate the required strength of the TV edit. Diverse Inversion finds within the model input space a large set of word embeddings, each of which induces the generation of the target concept. We find that encouraging diversity in the set makes our estimation more robust to unexpected prompts. Finally, we show that Diverse Inversion enables us to apply a TV edit only to a subset of the model weights, enhancing the erasure capabilities while better maintaining the core functionality of the model.

Submission history

Access paper:.

• HTML (experimental)
• Other Formats

References & Citations

• Google Scholar
• Semantic Scholar

BibTeX formatted citation

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Code, data and media associated with this article, recommenders and search tools.

• Institution

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs .

Skip to Content

Call for Papers International Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (IJAHSS)

Call for Papers 

International Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (IJAHSS) 

ISSN: 2693-2547 (Print), 2693-2555 (Online)  

Doi-10.56734/ijahss.

  International Journal of Arts, Humanities & Social Science (IJAHSS) is an Open Access double blind peer reviewed Academic journal and is published under Institute for Promoting Research & Policy Development (IPRPD) which encourages research on current & updated trends of different aspects of Arts, Humanities & Social Science. The journal publishes leading and robust research papers on traditional as well as modern Arts, Humanities & Social Science aspects. We aim to maintain the highest standards of peer review with some internationally recognized editors.

A list is provided below where topic of Interest includes but not limited to:

Arts:  Arts History, Film Production, Performing Arts, Architecture Industrial Design, Interior Design etc.

Humanities:  Literature, Ancient & Modern Language, Law, Philosophy, History, Human Integrative History.

Social Sciences:  Education,Linguistics, Politics, Education, Ecology, Anthropology, Archaeology, Political Science, Public Administration, Gender Studies, Development Studies, Sociology, IR, Geography & So on.

The journal is currently  Abstracted/Indexed in - CrossRef, Index of Copernicus, DOAJ, Ulrich's, DRJI, Cite Factor, J-Gate, Advanced Sciences Index (ASI), ROAD, Sherpa Romeo, Google Scholar, Scribd, Research Gate, Semantic Scholar. We are in indexing process with CrossCheck, Cabell's, Griffith Research Online, EBSCO. 

DOI ®  Number 

A unique DOI (Digital Object Identifier) number is provided to each paper published under IJAHSS and the assigned DOI number for the journal is-  10.56734/ijahss .  

IJAHSS is inviting papers for Vol. 5, Issue No. 05. The Submission Deadline is April 30, 2024.  

The paper will be published in 7 days after acceptance.   

Authors are highly encouraged & invited to submit their manuscripts through-  [email protected]

• Bulletin Board