The subject of this paper is the relationship between the social and the psychological, with emphasis on the scientific basis of strengthening the influence of psychology on the understanding of the economic sphere of social life. In this regard, the paper gives a critical review of different concepts of economics as the science of behavior, i.e. its rootedness in the science of behavior. Justification of efforts to make economics retain its traditional distance from psychology is supported by the idea of the necessary recognition of interactive relationships and unintended consequences of behavior of economic actors. At the same time, the scientific relevance of the notion that the study of economic phenomena should be approached from the aspect of their social autonomy, uniqueness, and specificity is substantiated by a set of epistemological and logical inconsistencies of views of one-way causality from the psychological to the social, thereby focusing the methodological starting point of modern economic theory in the direction of denying attempts to identify the individualistic with the psychologistic method.