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, loc. 331