Marginal to the Revolution: The Curious Relationship between Economics and the Behavioral Sciences Movement in Mid-Twentieth-Century America

Jefferson Pooley and Mark Solovey

History of Political Economy, 2010, vol. 42, issue 5, 199-233

Abstract: American economics largely ignored the behavioral sciences movement in the decade after World War II. The social scientists who adopted the “behavioral sciences†moniker were self-consciously nomothetic, fond of mathematics and statistical analysis, and eager to stand close to the natural sciences. The same was true of leading postwar economists, and yet they alone opted out, with only a few exceptions. We explore this divide as it emerged in the early development of the Ford Foundation's Behavioral Sciences Program (BSP). We describe early efforts to incorporate economics into the BSP in a substantial manner, premised on the belief that economic analysis could be greatly strengthened by the behavioral science orientation, with its emphasis on rigorous empirical study of actual human behavior. Yet these efforts failed, in large part because economists, especially those commonly labeled “neoclassical,†were uninterested, skeptical, and even dismissive of what they took to be an immature and faddish initiative. Gaps in postwar prestige and clashing models of social science contributed to the Ford Foundation's decision to fund economics on a separate track from the other social sciences. In our account, the adoption of the “behavioral sciences†terminology in tandem with the movement's institutional anchoring at the Ford Foundation thus reflected and widened the split between economists and their counterparts in the other social sciences.

Keywords: behavioral sciences; Ford Foundation; Behavioral Sciences Program (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hope.dukejournals.org/content/42/Suppl_1/199.full.pdf+html link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hop:hopeec:v:42:y:2010:i:5:p:199-233

Access Statistics for this article

History of Political Economy is currently edited by Kevin D. Hoover

More articles in History of Political Economy from Duke University Press Duke University Press 905 W. Main Street, Suite 18B Durham, NC 27701.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Center for the History of Political Economy Webmaster ().