Bob Raleigh

As a psychologist, it is not surprising that Bob Raleigh’s interest in people’s motivation goes all the way back to his first job, as a youth worker at the Huntington Family Center in Syracuse, NY. It was there that he was first introduced to an array of points of view that people bring to their reality. It all starts with understanding people.

Fast forward a few years and from there Raleigh went on to Hobart and William Smith Colleges where he played football and lacrosse, and earned his BA in Psychology, followed by his Ph.D. in psychology from Syracuse University.

After nearly 10 years applying the lessons of psychology in central New York, he found that other parts of the world would welcome his insights of knowing who you are engaging with before you try to change their behavior.

For example, Unisys was expanding its work into schools, universities and research centers and Raleigh found himself working with a team that was developing an early version of Artificial Intelligence Expert Systems. They were trying to embed the knowledge of a Nobel Laureate in economics onto a workstation for commercial use. While being early to the A.I. field of study, this experience emphasized the importance of knowing which insights are foundational to behavior change.

Eager to explore the intersection of data science and psychology, Raleigh took his quest to the fields of entertainment and communications. Working with sales, research, and business development he found insights that were built on personal preferences of different audiences that could be organized around a generalized theory of why people engaged with the content that Hollywood was making.

As that world was transforming, Raleigh felt the need to try to add to his point of view the question, “Why, do we do what we do?” In 2014 Raleigh founded PathSight Predictive Science and began to focus full time on that question.  What he found is that demographics give us insights into what particular people do but are woefully inadequate in explaining why they do it. That became the organizing principle for PathSight to pursue.  

Bob Raleigh is the author of the book The Search For Why: A Revolutionary New Model for understanding Others, Improving Communication, and Healing Division, sold by Simon & Schuster’s Tiller Press (2021) , and available in bookstores now.