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The branch of science numerous to the study of communities and the relationships among persons within those societies is known as social science. Previously, the phrase was used to refer to sociology, the first social science, which was founded in the century. It now involves a wide range of academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, human geography, linguistics, management science, political science, psychology, and history, in addition to sociology.

Positivist social scientists explain society using methods similar to those employed in natural sciences, and so define science in the stricter modern sense while the Interpretivist social scientists, may address science in its broadest sense using social critique or symbolic interpretation. Researchers in modern academic work are usually eclectic, employing a variety of methods. Because practitioners from varied areas share the same goals and approaches, the phrase social research has received some autonomy.

The social sciences are scientific fields of study that are taught and researched at the college or university level. Academic journals, in which research is published, as well as learned social science societies and academic departments or faculties, to which their practitioners belong, define and acknowledge social scientific fields.

Anthropology is the study of human civilizations and cultures, as well as their evolution. Anthropology is the holistic science of man, a study of all parts of life. Different components of the social sciences, humanities, and human biology are integrated in this discipline. Academic disciplines were usually institutionally split into three broad categories in the twentieth century. Natural sciences use repeated and verified experiments to derive general laws. Local traditions are studied in the humanities through history, literature, music, and the arts, with an emphasis on understanding individual people, events, or eras. The social sciences have generally worked to create scientific methods for understanding social phenomena in a generalizable fashion; however they have done so using methods that differ from those used in the natural sciences.

In many domains of psychology, anthropological social sciences generate detailed descriptions rather than general laws drawn from physics or chemistry, or they may explain individual cases using more topics. Anthropology is difficult to categories into one of these areas, and different branches of the field draw on one or more of these domains. Archaeology, physical or biological anthropology, anthropological linguistics, and cultural anthropology are the four subfields of anthropology in the United States. It is a subject that is covered in most undergraduate programmes. In Ancient Greek, the word anthropos meant human being or person.

Anthropology's purpose is to present a fuller view of humanity and human nature. This means that, even though anthropologist’s specialization in a single topic, they always consider the biological, linguistic, historical, and cultural components of a problem. Since anthropology's founding as a science in complex and mechanized Western societies, a major trend in the field has been a methodological push to study peoples in societies with in anthropological literature, simpler social systems are frequently referred to as primitive, but this does not imply inferiority. To refer to humans living in non-industrial, non-Western cultures, anthropologists use terms like less complex societies or refer to specific modes of subsistence or production, such as pastoralist or forager or horticulturalist.