In no other field of knowledge, according to Schmölders, was the gap between theory and practice wider than between economic research and economic policy, since economists had withdrawn into an “ivory tower of mathematical abstractions and hypothetical logicisms.” Economic behavioral research was Schmölders’s attempt to bridge the gap and overcome the predicament. He carefully distinguished his approach from a narrower understanding of traditional behaviorism. Economists should make use of all “anthropological sciences” that offered insights into the motives, incentives, and impetuses of economic activity: “psychology of the conscious and unconscious (including its behavioristic branches), biology and brain science, … as well as sociology, history, social anthropology, linguistics and comparative animal ethology and sociology."

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 328