Anthropology is the study of humanity and its works, from the most remote point in human prehistory to the cultural, linguistic, and biological diversity of the present. Anthropologists study existing cultures and human behavior, traditions (folklore), prehistoric cultures and lifeways, the biological makeup and evolution of humans, and the origin and nature of language (linguistics).

Behavioural economics concentrates on explaining the economic decisions people make in practice, especially when these conflict with what conventional economic theory predicts they will do.

The emergence of behavioural economics has revealed a number of insights into real-world economic and business phenomena by integrating elements of economic theory and experimental psychology.

Behaviourists try to augment or replace traditional ideas of economic rationality (homo economicus) with decision-making models borrowed from psychology. According to psychologists, people are disproportionately influenced by a fear of feeling regret and will often forgo benefits even to avoid only a small risk of feeling they have failed.

Traditional utility theory assumes that people make individual decisions in the context of the big picture. However there is lots of evidence that people are persistently and irrationally overconfident. They are also vulnerable to hindsight bias: once something happens they overestimate the extent to which they could have predicted it.

Biogeography is a comparative observational science. The spatial and temporal scales are often too large for experimentation. Instead, theories are developed by searching for patterns, formulating theories, testing assumptions and predictions with new observations.

Biopsychology is, rather obviously, a combination of biology and psychology. It’s a trendy new discipline which has been hijacked by a number of far-out semi-scientific tendencies.

Biopsychology deals with the relationship between humans' biological make up (hormones, chemicals, etc.) and their behavior in industrial, business, institutional, health, and environmental settings.

Biopsychologists hope to assist in the understanding of human nature.

Cognitive linguistics aims to explore and describe language in ways that conform with cognitive accounts of the mind, and tends to oppose theories of language which are based on the 'language engine' approach of generative linguistics.

Cognitive Linguistics incorporates cognitive semantics, dealing mainly with lexical semantics, and cognitive approaches to grammar, dealing mainly with syntax, morphology and other more grammar-oriented areas.

One activity that might fall under the rubric of cognitive neuroscience is the effort to formulate cognitive theories in terms of the underlying neural computations.

Related disciplines include neurophysiology, neuroanatomy,
and neuropsychology.

Cognitive psychology is the study of cognition, that is, the bundle of mental processes that underlie behavior, including the workings of memory, attention, perception, knowledge representation, reasoning, creativity and problem solving.

The discipline originated in the 1960s; one of its founders, Ulric Neisser, said: '...the term "cognition" refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations...'

Cognitive psychology accepts the use of the scientific method, and generally rejects introspection as a valid method of investigation.

Biology has spawned countless disciplines.  Biologists may specialize on a specific group of organisms or may take a comparative approach to study certain life processes. A comparative biologist may study life at various levels - molecular, cellular, organismal, population, community or ecosystem.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe recognised comparative biology, not as a passive science obsessed with counting similarities as it is today, but as an active field wherein he sought to perceive the inter-relationships of individual organisms to the organic whole.

Cultural anthropology is related to social anthropology and is also sometimes called socio-cultural anthropology. It attempts to integrate the 'nature' and 'nurture' views of human cultural devleopment.

Modern socio-cultural anthropology originated in 19th century "ethnology", which involves the systematic comparison of human societies. Ethnologists had an especial interest in why people living in different parts of the world sometimes had similar beliefs and practices.

Practitioners push the boundaries of anthropology, engaging a range of concerns in humanities, social sciences, and science studies and encouraging the growth of anthropological approaches to technoscientific cultures, practices, and knowledges.

In the 20th century many social or cultural anthropologists turned to the study of ethnography, in which an anthropologist actually lives among another society for a considerable period of time, simultaneously participating in and observing the social and cultural life of the group.

Such anthropologists were less interested in comparing cultures, generalizing about human nature, or discovering universal laws of cultural development, than they were in understanding particular cultures in their own terms. They and their students promoted the idea of "cultural relativism," that a person's beliefs and behaviors could only be understood in the context of the culture in which he or she lived.

The science which treats of the division of mankind into races, their origin, distribution, and relations, and the peculiarities which characterize them

Among its goals are the reconstruction of human history, and the formulation of laws of culture and culture change, and the formulation of generalizations about human nature.

Ethnology has been a scientific discipline since the late 18th century. It is closely related to cultural anthropology, although it is not entirely the same.

Evolutionary biology deals with the evolution of species, with an emphasis on their physical or taxonomic aspects. It may include specialists in particular species such as mammals or birds who use their knowledge to answer more general evolutionary questions. It also includes paleontogists who use fossils to answer questions about the course of evolution.

Evolutionary biology as an academic discipline in the 1930s and 1940s. By 1990, a significant number of universities had departments that specifically included the term evolutionary biology in their titles.

Many universities have split their biology departments into molecular/cell biology and evolutionary biology departments.

Evolutionary neuroscience is a new field of research which applies the principles of evolution to explain the differences between humans and animals in terms of neurological structure and capacity. Researchers study the neurological underpinnings of the phenomena of sensory perception, memory, visual abstraction, intellectual abstraction (including language, art and science) and emotional acceleration and attempt to combine them in a synthesis which will roughly resemble the human mind. They hope to explain, using evolutionary principles applied to advances in cognition, how human brains advanced so rapidly in a comparatively short period of evolutionary time.

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and practitioners are called linguists or linguisticians.

Linguistics comprises a number of over-lapping sub-disciplines.

Synchronic linguistics is concerned with the form of a language at a given moment.

Diachronic linguistics covers the history of a language or family of languages and structural changes over time.

Theoretical (or general) linguistics is concerned with frameworks for describing individual languages and theories about universal aspects of language.

Applied linguistics applies these theories to other fields.

Contextual linguistics is concerned with how language fits into the world: its social function, how it is acquired, how it is produced and perceived.

Independent linguistics considers languages for their own sake, aside from the externalities related to a language.

People who call themselves simply linguists or theoretical linguists, with no further qualification, tend to be concerned with autonomous, theoretical synchronic linguistics, which is acknowledged as the core of the discipline.

Neuro-linguistics is an integration of the language sciences and the neurosciences; it includes interdisciplinary aspects of the biological foundations of language and its disorders.

'Neuro-linguistic programming' has become a buzzword of the new-age movement, but is a minor aspect of the discipline as properly conceived.

Neuromarketing is the study of the brain's responses to ads, brands, and other marketing concepts and messages. Knowledge about the emotional and other responses of the brain at a neurological level can be used by marketeers to make their selling techniques more effective. Many people see this work as manipulative and even creepy.

The branch of psychology that deals with the relationship between the nervous system, especially the brain, and cerebral or mental functions such as language, memory, and perception.

Neuropsychology involves the study, evaluation, and treatment of known and suspected brain disorders using the methods of psychology.

Paleo-anthropology is the study of extinct members of the genus Homo sapiens and our hominid ancestors such as Australopithecus.

It is multidisciplinary in nature, bringing together physical anthropologists, archaeologists, paleontologists, geologists and a range of other researchers whose work has the potential to shed light on hominid behavioral and biological evolution.

Paleontology is the study of the history of life on earth animals based on the fossil record. This includes the study of body fossils, tracks, burrows, cast off parts, fossilized faeces ("coprolites"), and chemical residues.

Paleontology overlaps with geology, botany, biology, zoology, and ecology.

Sub-fields includ paleogeography and paleoclimatology (the study of the effect of long-term physical changes of global geography and climate on the evolution of life.

Social anthropology is the branch of anthropology that deals with human culture and society. It was developed in Great Britain in the early years of the twentieth century, under heavy French influence, and inspired by the methodological ideals of fieldwork pioneered by the Polish-British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski.

Differences between social and cultural anthropology (the US version) which were fought over in the 20th century have perhaps largely been resolved.

Sociobiology is often considered a branch of the biology and sociology disciplines, although it uses techniques from a plethora of sciences, including ethology, evolution, zoology, archeology, population genetics, and many others. Within the study of human societies, sociobiology is closely related to the fields of human ecology and evolutionary psychology.

Sociobiology is highly controversial since it contends that genes play a role in human behaviour. Sociobiologists believe that animal or human behaviour cannot be satisfactorily explained entirely by "cultural" or "environmental" factors alone.

Structural anthropology got its start with Claude Levi-Strauss, following Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, and focuses on the fundamental mental structures of the human mind that are supposed to underlie all acts of human behaviour.

There was a strong concentration on kinship as a basis of cultural structures. Because of its strong focus on vertical social relations, Levi-Strauss' model of kinship systems came to be called alliance theory, but it had faded from attention by 1980.

It was a weakness of structuralism that its main propositions were not formulated in a way which allowed their falsification.