Standard Social Science Model - Criticisms

Criticisms

Richardson (2007) argues that evolutionary psychologists developed the SSSM as a rhetorical technique: "The basic move is evident in Cosmides and Tooby's most aggressive brief for evolutionary psychology. They want us to accept a dichotomy between what they call the "Standard Social Science Model" (SSSM) and the "Integrated Causal Model" (ICM) they favor ... it offers a false dichotomy between a manifestly untenable view and their own." Wallace (2010) has also suggested the SSSM to be a false dichotomy and claims that "scientists in the EP tradition wildly overstate the influence and longevity of what they call the Standard Social Science Model (essentially, behaviorism)".

Geoffrey Sampson argues that the SSSM is based on a straw man. He views Pinker's claim that the SSSM has been the dominant theoretical paradigm in the social sciences since the 1920s as "completely untenable". He cites British education policies in the 20th century which were based on the belief that children had in-built talents and needs, thus challenging Pinker's assertion that the view of the mind as a tabula rasa was ubiquitous. Moreover, Sampson states that the scientists Pinker associates with the SSSM such as Skinner, Watson, and Mead were influential, "but to identify them as responsible for the general tone of intellectual life for eighty years seems comical." Similarly, Neil Levy suggests that the conception of the SSSM against which evolutionary psychologists direct much of their criticism is a straw man. He adds that "no-one – not even Skinner and his followers – has ever believed in the blank slate of Pinker's title."

Hilary Rose has criticized Tooby and Cosmides' arbitrary exclusion of economics and political science from their SSSM model which Rose argues is "rather like excluding physiology and biochemistry from an account of the life sciences." She also states that Tooby and Cosmides' have ignored new developments and efforts by sociologists and anthropologists to study the natural sciences and technology to indict the social sciences as cutting themselves off from other academic disciplines. Furthermore, Rose suggests that Tooby and Cosmides' characterization of scientists like Gould, Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin as SSSM adherents is based on an inaccurate reading of works like The Mismeasure of Man and Not in Our Genes, two books that have explored the interplay between biology and the environment.