We are a new online magazine with a unique mission in today’s media landscape: make the valuable insights gathered from behavioral science accessible and useful to society.
Born out of the labs and offices of researchers and journalists, our aim is to be the defining source for news and analysis in behavioral science. In our pages, you will find analysis of current events by leading scientists, reports on developments in the field, interviews with experts, coverage of recently published books and papers, and a curation of some of the best behavioral science writing online.
We’ve been working on building and launching this magazine for over a year, but really the Behavioral Scientist was long in the making. Over the last decade, interest in the behavioral sciences and their application has grown tremendously—in governments, non-profits, businesses, schools, and start-ups. Despite this growth, there exists no single, mainstream platform devoted to reporting on and discussing developments in the behavioral sciences. So we decided to create it.
Who are we? Our editorial board comes from three institutions—ideas42, the Behavioral Science and Policy Association, and The Psych Report, with key support from the Center for Decision Research at University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Before we joined forces, each of us was trying in our own way to fulfill the mission of the Behavioral Scientist.
Last fall, we recognized we could do so much more if we worked together. We knew we wanted a site that was engaging to the largest possible audience while staying true to the science. We also wanted our writers and contributors to come from business, government, and non-profits, in addition to academia. Over the past year, we’ve assembled a remarkable group of founding columnists who shared our vision and agreed to lend their expertise to this cause.
Together, our columnists represent over 40 organizations from across the United States, Europe, and Australia. They have backgrounds across a wide range of disciplines—psychology, economics, design, organizational behavior, public policy, political science, sociology, network science, philosophy, engineering, and neuroscience. Their expertise touches on a diverse set of topics—education, health care, politics, business, environment, law, immigration, and technology. This site is organized around these two categories—fields and topics—with the aim that it will be easy to navigate and useful for a diverse audience.
We’ve built this platform with the hope that behavioral scientists, practitioners, and journalists beyond our founding columnists will contribute their own commentary and reports.
That brings us to the most important question: who is the Behavioral Scientist for? In short, everyone. We know policymakers, educators, entrepreneurs, managers at both enterprises and nonprofits, and journalists can all benefit from the insights of behavioral science. We want each of our articles to have something that readers will find valuable in understanding the world and perhaps worth applying in their own lives. In William James’s words, “Truth in our ideas means their power to work.”
So let’s get started.
