Social sciences

Social sciences, group of studies concerned with humanity in relation to its cultural, social, and physical environment; 1 of the 3 main divisions of human knowledge, the others being the natural sciences and the humanities. The social sciences usually include anthropology, archeology, demography, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology. Social scientists model their disciplines on the natural sciences in order to achieve a similar level of consensus, but can be frustrated by conceptual tools that are limited in relation to the complexity of their subject matter and by controlled experiments of limited scope.