William Sims Bainbridge

William Sims Bainbridge (born October 12, 1940) is an American sociologist who currently resides in Virginia. He is co-director of Cyber-Human Systems at the National Science Foundation (NSF). He is the first Senior Fellow to be appointed by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Bainbridge is most well known for his work on the sociology of religion. Beginning in the 2010s he has published work studying the sociology of video gaming.

Career Bainbridge began his academic career at the Choate Rosemary Hall preparatory school in his birthstate of Connecticut. He matriculated at Yale University and Oberlin College before settling on Boston University, where he received his B.A. in sociology in 1971. Initially, he studied music and became a skilled piano-tuner. In his free time, he constructed harpsichords and clavichords with the "Bainbridge" name, which still exist in a few households.

Bainbridge received his Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard University in 1975 and went on to study the sociology of religious cults. In 1976, he published his first book, The Spaceflight Revolution, which examined the push for space exploration in the 1960s. In 1978, he published his second and most popular book, entitled Satan's Power, which described several years in which Bainbridge infiltrated and observed the Process Church, a religious cult whose founders had been members of Scientology. The study was one of the last of this type of academic studies done before new rules were introduced restricting unregulated participatory observation and study.

After completing his doctorate, Bainbridge served as an assistant (1975–1980) and associate professor (1980–1982) of sociology at the University of Washington. During this period, he worked with departmental colleague Rodney Stark on the Stark-Bainbridge theory of religion. Upon returning to Harvard as a visiting associate professor of sociology (1982–1987), he co-wrote the books The Future of Religion (1985) and A Theory of Religion (1987) with Stark. As of 2013, their theory, which aims to explain religious involvement in terms of rewards and compensators, is seen as a precursor of the more explicit recourse to economic principles in the study of religion later developed by Laurence Iannaccone and others.

From this period until the 2000s Bainbridge published more books dealing with space, religion, and psychology. These included a text entitled Experiments in Psychology (1986), which included psychology experimentation software coded by Bainbridge. Handbook of Science and Technology Convergence (with Mihail C. Roco) (2016) Convergence of Knowledge, Technology and Society (with Mihail C. Roco, Bruce Tonn, George Whitesides) (2013) Leadership in Science and Technology (2012) Progress in Convergence: Technologies for Human Wellbeing (with Mihail C. Roco) (2006) Nanotechnology: Societal Implications—Maximizing Benefit for Humanity (with Mihail C. Roco) (2006) Nanotechnology: Societal Implications—Individual Perspectives (with Mihail C. Roco) (2006) Managing Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno Innovations: Converging Technologies in Society (with Mihail C. Roco) (2006) Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction (2004) Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance (with Mihail C. Roco) (2003) Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (with Mihail C. Roco) (2001).

In addition to his books, Bainbridge has published over 200 articles and essays in various journals and encyclopedias. From 2013, when he published eGods, his work has shifted towards the study of the sociology of video gaming, beginning with the publication of a new article (co-authored with his daughter Wilma Alice Bainbridge) on the potentially interesting aspects of glitches in video games. He has also studied "personality capture" in software, the process by which one may save one's personality in a computer through the answering of vast personality surveys. and is distantly related to Commodore William Bainbridge.