What exactly is Behavioural Science?

An experiment is being conducted. There are a number of children sitting around a table. In front of each child a plate with a marshmellow on it is placed. Then the children are told that they could have the marshmellow right now or if they can refrain from eating the first marshmellow for ten minutes, they could have a second marshmellow. Half of them wolf down the marshmellow, can't wait. Others start to squirm wondering whether the future self can resist. Two are very calm and look at each other with curious expressions.

Well, what a cruel way to measure the degrees between will and desire. Sacrificing the present for future benefit is one of the traits of being conscientious but one must ask what is behind the motivation of waiting. Is it prudence or greed? Success is fine but people want it and think that there is a method to achieving success. Some kinds of success are motivated solely by a nobility of spirit yet others result from complex levels of motivations that range from the acceptable to the intolerable forms of greed.

The role that belief systems have on human behaviour is not insignificant. Some would say that it is total as the sole determinant of human destiny, especially that of recent history that takes the world from Handel to Hitler.

Surely calling the investigation into human behaviour a science is an error. How can a reliable science be created from something as unpredictable as human behaviour? Which unpredictability would you like to eliminate first in order to make Man fit the Science?

Imagine a hypothetical. Let's say the government allows a day where no man-made laws of conduct and sanctions apply. Whatever you do is entirely up to you. The law enforcement agencies are closed. The magistrates sleep. No policemen will respond to calls. No soldier will guard the monuments. On a day such as this, what will stop people from doing whatever bad things they like?

It does not take much imagination to know almost certainly that such a day will descend into a lawless mayhem of absolute chaos. Those who, despite the absence of control, can exert only the good on a day know what is meant by 'Proper Being'; how morality is engaged in the quality of action. As bullets fly, as the glass shatters, as the blood flows, he sees that many, some even intimate friends, had merely been pretending the good not being it, fearing punishment rather than adoring the righteous. An obscure university professor brings out an anti-tank bazooka from his garage and blows a hole on the walls of Parliament House saying the politicians of today do not deserve his continuing support.

The next day as society begins counting the cost of freedom, they call in three eminent psychologists to evaluate how the day of legalised anarchy had gone. They conclude that; although the losses were terrible and the violence has been horrific, it is beyond reasonable doubt that an irrefutable truth about human behaviour has prevailed.