The main aim of the SIG is to foster interest in behavioural science and its usefulness for OR and to organise events which will be of interest to practitioners and academics alike. A secondary aim is to increase public knowledge and awareness of OR in general. Just as behavioural work from the likes of Simon, Kahneman and Gigerenzer has made contributions to economics, healthcare and policy, there is potential for similar benefits from behavioural OR.

The current growth in interest in behavioural OR stems from a long observed gap in 'people issues' in a wide sense, coupled with the emergence of a set of methods that promise the potential of being able to address such issues (Mingers and Rosenhead; Gary et al). The recognition of this gap is not new, nor does it represent a revolution of the field of OR, but what is perhaps new is the emergence of a set of methods and structured areas of study from behavioural science that may allow a more rigorous and systematic approach to behavioural issues within the OR field. For example, developments in OR could occur through integrating insights from cognitive modelling into human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty or from social experiments into the study of group behaviour. Equally, advances in computing as applied to the social sciences, particularly the increasing interest in agent-based modelling, is opening up new avenues for research which behavioural OR can explore.

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