The Ford Foundation funded a 1950s behavioral-sciences reorganization

Evidence

With his non-behavioristic approach to the analysis of empirically observable behavior, Schmölders was a rather solitary figure in the German academic economics of his time. Yet, he was part of a broader international trend of the 1950s to naturalize behavior and analyze it by social scientific means. Especially in the United States, a funding scheme initiated by the Ford Foundation launched a “behavioral revolution,” re-organizing large parts of the social and human sciences under the label “behavioral sciences” in order to improve the understanding of all aspects of human behavior. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 331

Categorization

• CANDY: A clean, tweetable historical fact: the Ford Foundation launched a ‘behavioral revolution’ that reorganized the social sciences under one label.
• XREF: connects to: Ford Foundation funding drove business schools’ academicization in the 1960s — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 322