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There are a variety of different schools of research which have conducted various human behavior studies in the past. Fields such as psychiatry, sociology, anthropology and even economics have taken a stab at better understanding how individuals and societies function. A great wealth of information has resulted, including countless books of a number of different genres and innumerable research papers, many published in peer reviewed periodicals. For many, the goal has been to quantify and give clearly defined parameters to how people will behave and how societies will function under a number of different circumstances. Some of the most obvious conclusions have been drawn by sociological and psychological studies, but many of the most interesting conclusions have been reached and proven through economic human behavior studies, few of which have anything at all to do with actual financial information. The most commonly thought of academic disciplines dealing with human behavior studies are sociology and anthropology. This seems to make sense, as this fields of science are specifically directed at the evolution and development of the human body, the human mind and human culture or societies, unfortunately there exist so many different cultures throughout the world that there are conflicting conclusions reached by a number of different researchers. Culture is a very relative construct and often the customs and practices of one culture don't effectively translate into another culture. While there are common links, much of what separates cultures are the unique aspects that do not exist in other societies. Taboos, accepted practices, morality and spirituality can be wildly different across cultural lines. This makes reaching a universally relevant conclusion very difficult. In the fields of psychology and psychiatry have attempted human behavior studies in their own right as well. With a focus on the mind itself, many relevant discoveries have been made when it comes to coping mechanisms, basic emotional responses and some motivations, but any conclusion is colored by the culture into which a subject has been born. This leaves any significance that these discoveries might have very difficult to translate into universally applicable truths. Society, culture and behavioral norms have huge impacts on the areas of human behavior that psychology and psychiatry study. As a result, these research projects alone often struggle to provide salient information on their own and often pair much more effectively with anthropological and sociological studies which investigate similar areas of behavior. Surprisingly, many of the most universally applicable conclusions have been reached through economic studies, investigating human behavior. Because almost all people and cultures have a risk versus reward aspect to them, economics is able to find interesting correlations between statistical information and the behaviors of the people generating those statistics. In economics, the human factor plays an essential role in any numerical data being created. Finding the root cause of the behaviors that drive the creation of those statistics often results in remarkable insights into how the human mind works. This could be finding a way of incentivizing scholastic performance to predicting the impact that a name can have on a person's future. Because of how diverse we are as a species, nailing down any universal conclusions can be tricky under the best of circumstances. Most human behavior must be interpreted through a cultural filter. While these studies do provide remarkable insights into a single culture they are often not as widely applicable as researchers might like. The divide between Eastern and Western culture still exists, and unfortunately this divide also exists on a number of other levels as well. Unfortunately, this means that finding a unifying truth which drives all human behavior is never an easy thing.
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