Write short note: Science and Social Behaviour. (1989)
Science alters not only what a society knows but how its members act — how they treat illness, weather, birth and misfortune. The sociologically interesting question is why conduct changes so much more slowly than knowledge, and why non-scientific behaviour survives in the most scientifically equipped societies.
Science as a mode of conduct
- Max Weber made rationalisation and disenchantment the master process: the modern person acts on the belief that everything can in principle be mastered by calculation, so recourse to magical means becomes unnecessary. Yet in “Science as a Vocation” (1917) he conceded that most of us do not know how the tram we board works; we act on trust in institutions, not on personal knowledge.
- Robert K. Merton treated the norms of science — universalism, organised scepticism, disinterestedness — as prescriptions for behaviour, and showed through the self-fulfilling prophecy that beliefs held to be scientific reshape conduct and then appear to be confirmed by it.
- William F. Ogburn‘s cultural lag locates the gap: material technique changes faster than habit, law and belief, and behaviour occupies the interval.
The Indian project of scientific temper
Jawaharlal Nehru made scientific temper (The Discovery of India, 1946) a national disposition rather than a specialist skill — the habit of evidence, doubt and revision in ordinary life. Article 51A(h) made it a fundamental duty in 1976, and the 1981 Statement on Scientific Temper carried it into public argument. Recent scholarship by Siddharth Kankaria and Anwesha Chakraborty (2024) argues that it has since narrowed into a “scientistic” promotion of technical careers, losing Nehru’s emphasis on a questioning, reflexive citizenry able to interrogate expertise itself.
Why non-scientific behaviour persists
- Bronisław Malinowski (Magic, Science and Religion, 1948) found Trobriand islanders relying on technical knowledge for lagoon fishing and on magic for the dangerous open sea. Magic appears where control fails; it is not the opposite of science but its complement under uncertainty.
- Claude Lévi-Strauss (The Savage Mind, 1962) showed that so-called pre-scientific classification is rigorously logical — a “science of the concrete” — so the contrast is between domains of application, not between reason and unreason.
- Brian Wynne‘s study of Cumbrian sheep farmers after Chernobyl found lay knowledge outperforming official expertise, which makes some public scepticism toward scientific authority itself rational.
- The costs of the persistence are nonetheless severe. Crime records point to roughly 2,500 witchcraft-related killings in India between 2000 and 2016, overwhelmingly of poor and low-caste women in areas where health care is absent. The rationalist Narendra Dabholkar was murdered in 2013, the event that forced Maharashtra’s anti-superstition and black magic legislation that year; two of the accused were convicted in May 2024.
Conclusion
Science changes behaviour where it is embedded in institutions, infrastructure and livelihood, not where it is merely preached — belief follows practice more often than practice follows belief. Scientific temper is therefore a property of social organisation, of schools, courts, media and public argument, before it is a property of individual minds.