A ‘Not Particularly Felicitous’ Phrase: A History of the ‘Behavioral Sciences’ Label

Abstract

The article reconstructs the history of the "behavioral sciences" label, from scattered interwar use through to the decisive embrace of the newly prominent Ford Foundation in the early Cold War. The rapid uptake of the label, the article concludes, was the result of the Ford Foundation’s 1951 decision to name its social science unit the “Behavioral Sciences Program” (BSP). With Ford’s en- couragement, the term was widely adopted by quantitative social scientists eager to tap the founda- tion’s social science funds. The label’s newness and its link to the gigantic foundation’s initiative generated much suspicion and resistance as well.

Framing psychology as a discipline (1950–1999): A large-scale term co-occurrence analysis of scientific literature in psychology.

“…The question of unification has often been labeled as a crisis (e.g., Goertzen, 2008). For more on the intellectual and social histories of these umbrella terms naming psychology, see the Introduction in Erickson et al (2013) on moral/social/behavioral sciences; Pooley and Solovey (2010) and Pooley (2016) on behavioral/social sciences; and for the inter- and multidisciplinary history of the cognitive sciences, see Cohen-Cole (2007). For a Foucauldian conception of “psy sciences,” see Nikolas Rose (1990, 1996).…”

The ultimate think tank: The rise of the Santa Fe Institute libertarian

“…Reflecting this ambition, SFI eventually rebranded its economics program as 'Behavioral Sciences'. With this move, one of the quintessential categories of Cold War human science received a jolt of new life for the neoliberal era: Once connoting a desire to place the study of human activity on a supposedly more scientific, laboratory-friendly basis, now the term primarily reflected the impulse to replace talk of macro-level social structures with analysis of the interaction of individual agents (Pooley, 2016;Solovey, 2013). 48 Starting from evolutionary psychology rather than complexity theory, Bowles and Gintis developed an image of society as a problem-solving organism that ultimately converged with the stance of earlier SFI work on complex adaptive systems.…”

Of Alcohol, Apes, and Taxes: Günter Schmölders and the Reinvention of Economics in Behavioral Terms

“…Partaking in the behavioral revolution in the social sciences in the mid-twentieth century, Schmölders, Simon, and others claimed that they started with empirically observable behavior, which they systematized and theorized in order to arrive at testable hypotheses. 19 While distinguishing this approach from classical behaviorism, behavioral economists, generally, shared the behaviorist goal to predict and control human behavior, once its invariant features and its relation to environmental factors had been determined (Berelson 1968;Pooley 2016). In order to achieve this aim, they advocated interdisciplinary approaches, calling for the integration of knowledge from the biological and the social sciences as well as psychology.…”

“…Thus, he was more willing to integrate findings from other disciplines into economic arguments. The simultaneous behavioral sciences project was also pluralist, suggesting that different disciplines contributed their particular perspectives to the common project to understand human behavior (Berelson 1968;Pooley 2016). By contrast, other behavioral economists strove for a comprehensive behavioral science in the singular, trying-as Simon put itto develop a "consistent body of theory of the rational and nonrational aspects of human behavior in a social setting," introducing a hegemonic perspective and paying only lip service to interdisciplinarity (Simon 1957, p. vii).…”