BIBLIOGRAPHY
The behavioral sciences study human behavior by scientific means; as a preliminary approximation, they can be distinguished from the social sciences as designating a good deal less but, at the same time, somewhat more. The term social sciences typically includes the disciplines of anthropology, economics, political science, sociology, and most of psychology. As a case in point, the scholarly associations in these five disciplinesalong with history and statisticsprovide the core membership of the (American) Social Science Research Council. The behavioral sciences, as that term was originally intended and as it is usually understood, include sociology; anthropology (minus archeology, technical linguistics, and most of physical anthropology); psychology (minus physiological psychology); and the behavioral aspects of biology, economics geography, law, psychiatry, and political science. The edges of any such broad concept tend to be fuzzyas are the edges of the social sciences themselvesbut the center seems to be reasonably clear. Given time, the term will probably settle down to one or two generally accepted meanings, if it has not already done so.
The term behavioral sciences came into currency, one might even say into being, in the United States in the early 1950s. A decade and a half later, it appears to be well established in American universities and disciplines and is well on its way to acceptance abroad. Before 1950 the term was virtually nonexistent; since then it has come into such general use that it appears in the titles of books and journals, of conference sessions, programmatic reports, university departments, professorships, and courses, as well as in the names of a book club, a book prize, several publishers series, and in the mass media of communication.
The story begins with a committee that undertook a study for the Ford Foundation in the late 1940s, when the foundation was about to enter on the enlarged program that made it, overnight, the largest private foundation in the world. This study committee, given the task of suggesting how the Ford Foundation can most effectively and intelligently put its resources to work for human welfare, concluded that the most important problems of human welfare now lie in the realm of democratic society, in mans relation to man, in human relations and social organizations and it recommended that the over-all objective be pursued in five program areasthe establishment of peace, the strengthening of democracy, the strengthening of the economy, education in a democratic society, and individual behavior and human relations. Among the social science disciplines, political science became involved in the first and second programs, economics in the third, and, in a more or less residual way, anthropology, psychology, and sociology in the fifth. In the study committees report appeared the term that soon became current, the behavioral sciences, and the beginnings of a definition to distinguish them from the social sciences: We have in the social sciences scientifically-minded research workers who are both interested in, and equipped for, the use of such techniques. Among these are the psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists. In addition, there are psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, as well as natural scientists, including geneticists and other biologists (Ford Foundation 1949, p. 92).
What happened to give rise to the term? The key event was the development of a Ford Foundation program in this field. The program was initially designated individual behavior and human relations but it soon became known as the behavioral sciences program and, indeed, was officially called that within the foundation. It was the foundations administrative action, then, that led directly to the term and to the concept of this particular field of study.
The conception was developed further in a staff paper, approved by the foundations trustees in early 1952, that put forward the first plan for the foundations program in this field. In that paper, hitherto unpublished, the notion of the behavioral sciences was characterized as follows:
In short, then, Program Five is conceived as an effort to increase knowledge of human behavior through basic scientific research oriented to major problem areas covering a wide range of subjects, and to make such knowledge available for utilization in the conduct of human affairs. (Ford Foundation 1953, pp. 35)
The report went on to identify the topics that constituted the subject matter of the behavioral sciences, at least insofar as the foundations interests were then concerned: political behavior, domestic and international; communication; values and beliefs; individual growth, development, and adjustment; behavior in primary groups and formal organizations; behavioral aspects of the economic system; social classes and minority groups; social restraints on behavior; and social and cultural change.
It was in this way that an administrative decision having to do with the programming and organization of a large foundation influenced at least the nomenclature, and probably even the conception, of an intellectual field of inquiry. The history of science contains several instances of intellectual concepts becoming administratively institutionalized, for example, psychoanalysis and gross national product (GNP). The concept behavioral sciences represents the reverse: an administrative arrangement that became intellectually institutionalized.
In the 1940s there were some similar stirrings within the universities themselves. In 1946 Harvard University organized a department of social relations, which was in fact, though not in name, a behavioral sciences department, even to the exclusion of economics, political science, parts of anthropology and psychology, and, after a brief experimental period, history. And about 1950 a group of social and biological scientists at the University of Chicago began to seek a general theory of behavior under the term behavioral sciences first, because its neutral character made it acceptable to both social and biological scientists and, second, because we foresaw a possibility of someday seeking to obtain financial support from persons who might confound social science with socialism (Miller 1955, p. 513). Earlier still, a somewhat similar effort was launched at the Institute of Human Relations at Yale University, although the line-up of specialties was different from what is now known as the behavioral sciences.
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