This chapter looks at social influences on neuroscience. It outlines that science is a social system, and subject to various social pressures that can affect what we study, how we study it, and how we interpret the data we obtain. This includes financial conflicts of interest, claims to priority, scientific prizes, peer review, ‘scientmanship’ that attempts to promote or suppress certain scientific views and scientists, and the recent quantification of social pressures in science from surveys that suggest that social pressures and career structures introduce behaviours that make science a difficult career for those lower in the scientific hierarchy, including racial and sexual biases, and can see those higher up using their prominence to affect how science is done and the claims made. I highlight that awareness of these negative social influences is starting to lead to approaches that aim to address these issues.