technological advances from the printing press to high speed computers. How much do you pay in taxes? Rice economists study the effects of different tax rates and structures on governments' abilities to provide services. Does it matter which kind of voting machine is used when you go into the voting booth? Rice political scientists examine how new electronic voting machines affect election outcomes and the reporting of those outcomes. How does your brain map what you have just read? Rice psychologists are answering questions about how the brain traces what you see and what you experience and what happens to those mappings if you become injured or have a stroke. How does race determine who you will date? Sociologists at Rice investigate how interracial exchanges and the lightness or darkness of people's skin affect marriage and other partnerships.

There are five departments in the School of Social Sciences: Anthropology, Economics, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology. Each department has top, nationally and internationally known scholars who work on the discovery of “social facts.” As much as scientists seek to uncover facts about the natural and physical worlds, social scientists seek to uncover facts about the social world. These social facts are actually in many ways more difficult to uncover than facts about the physical universe. Because the facts are about people, they are often a moving target. People change their minds; asteroids do not. People think they see something when often times they do not; cells are not per se confused or forgetful.

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