Why are Psychology and Neuroscience lumped together as one stack exchange?

Question

Can someone with the benefit of history explain please why the "Psychology & Neuroscience" is a single stack exchange site instead of two?

Psychology: the scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behaviour in a given context.

Neuroscience: a branch (such as neurophysiology) of the life sciences that deals with the anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, or molecular biology of nerves and nervous tissue and especially with their relation to behavior and learning.

merging them both together seems to me akin to merging say the software engineering and theoretical computer science stack exchanges.

• Software Engineering: Q&A for professionals, academics, and students working within the systems development life cycle)

• Theoretical Computer Science: Q&A for theoretical computer scientists and researchers in related fields)

looking over the full list of stack exchange sites I see no other cases of distinct subjects being merged together.

Answer 1

As AliceD posted, this has a very long history (almost 7 years ago), much of which can be found on Meta. In this post, I will simply link to some posts which I believe are relevant from the top of my head. I will leave it up to another post for someone to construct a more accurate time line if need be.

• Original site proposal was Cognitive Sciences which merged with Psychology and Psychology and Psychiatry. To find history about why Beta launched as 'Cognitive Sciences', you have to browse the Area51 discussions. The bottom line here is public beta sites can only launch once they have sufficient support. To do so, 'neuroscience' and other 'cognitive sciences' were also included in scope.
• A Neuroscience Area51 proposal has failed in the past, since the community team did not feel a new site for it was warranted. Neuroscience has always been on topic here. After this, we wanted to make it more explicit this community is welcome here.
• Most recently, we changed the name from Cognitive Sciences to Psychology & Neuroscience, for various reasons documented here.

Another good overall source to get to know the history of this community (although I cannot guarantee all of it immediately answers your question), is this review of Meta posts from 2012-2016. If anything, this should give you some additional context of this community within which to interpret your actual question.

Answer 2

This site has a long history behind it. In a nutshell, there are and afaik always have been, two major issues here:

1. a low number of users, questions and hence answers (low activity overall)
2. a high percentage of self-help questions (explicitly off-topic).

In an attempt to address both of these problems we have attempted to show to new users we are not 'just' Psychology, Psychiatry or Cognitive Sciences, but that we also welcome basic Neuroscience questions. The 'Science' element therein also stresses the scientific character of this site (deterring self-helps). There have been tons of meta posts on these matters, e.g. to name but a few:

• Cognitive Science Reboot 2017: Changing the Name
• What should we change the name of our site to, if anything?
• Refining scope and new site name

and also see the history of our site on Area51 (still not updated)

_{Above is my personal view and may not reflect this community's opinion at large.}