Alas: Behavioural science should never have become a catch-all term

livemint.com:

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.