It’s tempting to think that all of our aims pull us in the same direction. If we operate from consistent principles, it can feel like we should never have two goals fighting for space. For those trying to make the research and application of behavioral science more just, we tend to treat diminishing racism and implicit bias, eliminating gender-based discrimination, and fighting against colonialism as related terms, so fundamentally aligned that we often lump them under one heading: DEI.
But, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang remind us, decolonization is not a metaphor.1 Decolonial approaches aim to restore land and power to Indigenous peoples, and this may be to the detriment of other minorities in societies where Indigenous people have been systematically dispossessed. Decolonization is not a synonym for DEI, and researchers cannot treat the terms as interchangeable.
My point is not that we shouldn’t use the concept of decolonization to talk about behavioral science. We should use it more. However, as researchers in the field begin to take decolonial approaches, they should be aware of the specific demands that decolonization makes, and how it can come into conflict with other just and necessary aims. For example, a program that uses new cognitive tools to help executives avoid offensive speech can be part of a laudable social justice program. But, considering that it helps those executives to lead better without ceding power to Indigenous people, it is not a decolonial project.
Behavioral science could be a powerful tool in the fight against the legacy of colonialism. It aims to understand how unseen biases and ingrained heuristics affect our decision-making, and discover how to counteract them. As such, it’s precisely positioned to help us solve the most deeply-rooted problems in our culture. We just have to use it the right way.
Academic research and the end of colonialism
Decolonization, as may be obvious, originated as a concept with the expulsion of colonial powers from their territories. Writers such as Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant, deeply rooted in specific independence movements, theorized about the struggles they took part in. Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, one of the decolonization movement’s canonical texts, presents itself as a description of a series of problems facing an independence movement that becomes the leadership of a sovereign nation.2 The challenges are specific, the oppressors are named, and it’s not always easy to mine these texts for broader principles.
After independence, however, many of the problems of colonialism remained. Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah penned his book Neo-Colonialism, outlining how Western countries had pivoted from political to economic domination of the Global South.3 The same year, Brazilian educator Paolo Freire published Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which applied lessons from the anti-colonial revolutions to education.4 Pedagogy has, in the years since, become a standard reference for anti-colonial thinking in the humanities and social sciences.
However, as Tuck and Yang point out, it’s at this point that the concept begins to get a little slippery. Freire attempts to pioneer an approach that is valid for all oppressed people, everywhere. As such, he neglects to define who the “oppressed” are to whom he is speaking, who oppresses them, and what might be done to materially change the situation. Freire’s followers, therefore, can tend to assimilate all justice under the heading of “decolonization.”
Finally, in the wake of the student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, recognition spread that university instruction and academic research, as then practiced, reinforced colonial power structures. Students were taught a version of history that underplayed the contributions of non-Western nations to global society. Worse, the Western idea that the pursuit of knowledge had to be disinterested, secular, and mechanistic was portrayed as the only valid standard for inquiry, meaning that researchers missed out on everything from slaves’ accounts of their own conditions to indigenous knowledge of plant medicines that would later fuel medical discoveries.5
Decolonization, in research, emerged as a way to correct for this error. As currently applied, it is the effort to remove the ideological distortions of colonialism from scientific inquiry. But this can conceal the wider project of decolonization, as used beyond the ivory tower: to return Indigenous people control of their ancestral lands. It is not behavioral science that should benefit from decolonization, but the colonized themselves.
Whither behavioral science?
For a long time, behavioral science resisted the challenge of decolonization. While hundreds of papers were authored on how to decolonize psychology, medicine, and pedagogy, vanishingly few behaviorists heard the call. A PubMed search for “behavioral science” alongside terms related to decolonization currently returns zero results. However, this is starting to change. The University of the West Indies Press is currently at work on a volume titled A User’s Guide to Decolonising Behavioural Science.6 Many related fields, such as implementation science and policy, are doing extensive work to decolonize, and behavioral scientists should learn from their examples.
The limitations Tuck and Yang identified are, however, widely visible in these related fields. A recent paper in The Lancet, for example, gives an overview of decolonizing approaches in implementation science.7 The authors state that, if their recommendations were accepted, “rigour would be redefined—not as rigid fidelity to external models but as a focus on validity, relevance, and impact within community contexts.” This certainly bears the mark of academic decolonization (the attempt to rid research of colonial biases). Nevertheless, it addresses the needs of oppressed people broadly, without specific focus on Indigeneity. Further, the paper names one of its goals as “ensuring community control over the research process,” without specifying which community is to be given control. This could be decolonial in effect, if Indigenous communities are to direct research, but it could also be indifferent to decolonization, if the communities in question are not specifically Indigenous.
What we can contribute
As behavioral scientists begin to engage with decolonization, they will need to resist the temptation to treat it as simply another term for inclusive research. The field's tools—its understanding of how cognitive biases operate, how default settings shape decisions, how systemic nudges can redirect behavior at scale—are genuinely useful for dismantling colonial structures. But they are useful only insofar as they are directed toward the specific aims that decolonization demands: the restoration of Indigenous authority over land, governance, and knowledge.
A behavioral science that diversifies its study populations or incorporates non-Western frameworks into its methodology may be doing valuable work, but it is not necessarily doing decolonial work. Using the psychological tools the field offers to eliminate barriers to Indigenous landownership and self-governance, on the other hand, could truly advance decolonial aims. The distinction matters because collapsing it allows researchers to feel they have addressed colonialism's legacy without confronting its most uncomfortable demand, which is that something concrete must be given back.
Behavioral scientists entering this space should begin by asking whose autonomy their research serves, and whether the answer is specific enough to mean anything. If the field can hold onto that question—if it can resist the pull toward comfortable abstraction—it has the potential to contribute meaningfully to a project that extends well beyond the academy. The risk is that, without this discipline, decolonization becomes one more framework absorbed into the existing apparatus of institutional self-improvement, leaving the structures it was meant to dismantle fundamentally intact.
