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329 — The role of journalism and the media. How to deal with media demands for information; how best to transmit information to the public. — Social, psychological and anthropological implications of a successful search. Convincing analogies will not be easy to find, as these disciplines study contact between members of the same species on Earth. — Positions and responses of the world’s major religions; study and education in schools of divinity and comparative religion, as well as among religions themselves. — Should we reply? How do we address that question? We might begin by address- ing the process for making a decision. — Political, institutional, international, and legal actions following detection. Perhaps a separate body of law is needed. — Education about the discovery, and the contribution SETI can make to educa- tion. This includes preparing society for the possibility of discovery, which will require a thorough, widespread, and prolonged educational effort. — Analysis of the cultural aspects of SETI, using modern tools such as systems analysis, utility theory, cost-benefit studies, operations research, and decision theory.’ Experts who examined the social consequences of contact recommended directions for social science research—in particular, a thorough examina- tion of published reports on mass psychology, individual and public responses to cultural differences, to strangeness, and to science and tech- nology. They called for cross-cultural studies of popular images of extrater- restrials and saw a need to identify groups with unusual influence.’ We might add two themes. First, study societies whose cultures have proved most resilient in similar circumstances. Second, examine our his- torical experiences in attempting to communicate intent from one society or political entity to another. We might learn useful lessons from the least culture-bound findings about our experiences with negotiation and diplomacy. The authors of the SETI 2020 report recommended that the SETI Insti- tute expand programs to study the societal implications of detecting signals from an alien civilization, and that it encourage an active interest among scholars in these studies. Yet, the cultural impact of astrobiology was entirely absent from NASA’s first biennial conference on the subject. Dick and Strick speculated that this reflected both the difficulty of getting social scientists involved and the lack of encouragement from natural scientists.” Physical scientists and engineers often pigeonhole nonphysical, nontech- nological explanations for the behavior of extraterrestrials as “sociologi- cal.” We could move toward more useful common ground if we called them behavioral." Social scientists try to understand how humans act, and why. Their findings, where thoroughly proven in the real world, might provide a sounder basis for reasoning about alien behavior by analogy. Harrison and his colleagues proposed ways of getting social scientists more involved in SETI, including conferences, publishing in refereed The Social Science Dimension