Defining the new behavioral science(s)

Abstract

Behavioral science, once a hypernym for a collection of fields, is becoming a hyponym of itself. Nonacademic and academic practitioners alike increasingly discuss a “behavioral science,” a discipline that consolidates research from the other behavioral sciences to improve humans’ (and organizations’) predictive and manipulative powers. Despite the usefulness of a shared understanding of behavioral science, few can agree on a definition. After a brief overview of what behavioral scientists do and produce, I provide an inexhaustive list of the predicates behavioral scientists use to interpret the objects, people, and signs of their field and explore the grounding phase parts of objects’ or signs’ existence that behavioral scientists read to categorize objects or signs. I propose that behavioral scientists have begun to define behavioral science work by classifying objects or signs (which make up their work) using a partonomy in which a behavioral science-ness of a sign is directly positively correlated with the strength of its relation to the signs psychology and economics. Finally, I discuss what this definitional practice suggests for the behavioral science field now and in the future.