What Were the Behavioral Sciences?

This paper traces the history of the U.S. behavioral sciences movement: a self-understood vanguard of U.S. social scientists—all the mainline disciplines except economics—forged in shared World War II service, maintained through funder-enabled networks of the early Cold War, and characterized by a mix of nomothetic confidence and aspirational scientism, until the movement’s decline in the mid-1960s. The behavioral sciences, the paper argues, were a social and intellectual formation with a mission—a movement, in other words. They were U.S. sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, and anthropologists, joined by a small number of like-minded economists. Most them had worked alongside one another in the World War II propaganda and morale bureaucracy, and were soon brought back together in the early Cold War by foundations and the military funders. They defined themselves against what they saw as a pre-scientific, speculative, meliorist social science, and—to a significant if lesser extent—against the emerging mainstream of postwar economics. Their aim was to promote an alternative vision for social science, one characterized by scientific rigor, nomothetic theory-building, and a broadly empiricist picture of knowledge accumulation. They aspired to fold mathematics into their methodological toolkits. They embraced the view that team-based interdisciplinary projects centered on applied problems could contribute to theoretical progress. They were a small, tight-knit community of American social scientists, clustered at elite institutions and in relative generational synchrony. Their movement, owing to shifts in patronage, the scale of the U.S. university system, and revelations about clandestine ties to the U.S. national security state, was in sharp decline by the mid-1960s.