What Were the Behavioral Sciences?

This talk attempts to define an important formation in post-World War II U.S. social sciences, the self-identified “behavioral sciences.” Despite evolving and contested boundaries—as well as wildly different meanings in the historiography— Pooley claims that the behavioral sciences “movement” took on a relatively durable shape over the first two post-war decades. A series of social and intellectual commonalities bound the self-anointed vanguard. Most of these sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and social psychologists had worked alongside one another in the World War II propaganda and morale bureaucracy, and were 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.