Opinion
Alas: Behavioural science should never have become a catch-all term
Summary
- An umbrella term blurs what the field of studying human behaviour is about, makes space for theory mix-ups and holds back the process of revising our knowledge as it makes advances.
Till the turn of the century, the term ‘psychology’ connoted any serious study of human behaviour. Maybe it is due to the importance that Behavioural Economics gained since Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002 that the term to connote the systematic study of human behaviour has lately changed from ‘psychology’ to ‘Behavioural Science.’ I see many an organization using this term to denote its focus on the study of human behaviour. For some, the addition of the word ‘science’ adds heft to their attempts to bring scientific rigour to the study.
In the past, I have often written in this column about the humongous failure rate in managing human behaviour. This rate in marketing and organizational behaviour management is placed at over 70%. Most of us know that when the covid pandemic hit, the healthcare fraternity pulled off a wonder by inventing a vaccine—which usually takes 8-10 years—in just six months. But human behaviour experts were clueless on how to motivate ordinary citizens to take that life-saving vaccination. Given the huge failure rate in human behaviour management, much needs to be done to improve our understanding of human behaviour.
There are multiple theories to explain human behaviour. Theories like Behaviourism, Psychoanalysis and others by William James, Wilhelm Wundt and Carl Jung date back to the late 19th century. In the 20th century, other theories came up; think of Cognitive Science,Transactional Analysis and Maslow’s Theory of Motivation. As V.S. Ramachandran, professor of psychology and director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, says: “There are as many psychology theories as there are psychologists."
The study of human behaviour is not just about how individuals behave. To study the complexities of social behaviour and better understand behaviour, learnings are taken from the fields of classical economics, sociology and anthropology, and these days, also from Behavioural Economics, Neuroscience and Data Analytics.
Progress is not just about inventing something. It is also about discarding things that are considered outdated and replacing them with the new. The field of human behaviour has a peculiar problem. We don’t discard anything that is old. Even as new knowledge comes in, we still tend to cling on to outdated notions and thinking.
While evaluating various theories of human behaviour, one should be clear as to which theory or which part of it works or which does not work. For example, when it came to explaining human behaviour, the Psychoanalysis theory put forward by Sigmund Freud was the toast of the town in the early 20th century. But today, with the creation of modern tools to understand the workings of the human brain, it is known that many of Freud’s assumptions about human behaviour were fundamentally flawed.
It is also important to specify which theory is being used. One can, for example, use Freud’s Psychoanalysis theory to explain behavioural processes occurring below the thresholds of consciousness, or one could use learnings from the field of Cognitive Neuroscience to explain the non-consciousness processes that guide human behaviour. Both explanations would be completely different. While the former has no scientific basis, however, the latter is based on empirical experiments.
With advancements in our understanding of the human brain—the source of all human thoughts and actions—our broad grasp of human behaviour has changed fundamentally. The conscious, rational universe of human behaviour has been replaced by a paradigm of human behaviour that goes almost totally by non-conscious and emotional inner motives. But the umbrella term ‘Behavioural Science’ does not capture this paradigm shift in the world’s knowledge base.
In fact, the biggest irony today in the study of human behaviour is that multiple theories of it, old and new, are all combined under one catch-all term: ‘Behavioural Science.’ The limitations of past theories are unlikely to be called out if the study of human behaviour is placed under one banner term. At the same time, the practitioners of new theories are not able to differentiate themselves from those using outdated theories.
All other fields of study specify their areas of academic focus in the light of modern advancements. For example, the American Institute of Physics divides modern Physics into 10 major fields. So, instead of placing all studies under a common term, the discipline has fields that range from the Physics of Elementary Particles and Electromagnetism to AstroPhysics. Splitting a large field of study into various sub-fields allows one to understand the complexity of the subject and focus on each knowledge component of it. On a similar note, human behaviour professionals too should declare the specific knowledge areas they base their understanding of human behaviour on.
Using a blanket-all term like Behavioural Science to connote all that is happening in the study of human behaviour lets outdated theories and practices conveniently hide their inadequacies behind that moniker. At the same time, it makes it harder for modern and more effective practices to stand out and be counted. As a term, ‘Behavioural Science’ is therefore doing a huge disservice to the critical cause of developing a better understanding of our behaviour.
