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. Recently he has published work studying the sociology of video gaming.

Bainbridge began his academic career at the Choate Rosemary Hall preparatory school in his birthstate of Connecticut. He went on to matriculate at Yale University and at Oberlin College, and finally settled on Boston University. 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 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.

During the late 1970s and 1980s Bainbridge worked with Rodney Stark on the Stark-Bainbridge theory of religion, and 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 more explicitly recourse to economic principles in the study of religion, as 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.He also studied the religious cult The Children of God, also known as the Family International, in his 2002 book The Endtime Family: Children of God.

The Future of Religion won the "Outstanding Book of the Year" award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in 1986 and A Theory of Religion won the "Outstanding Scholarship" from the Pacific Sociological Association in 1993.

Bainbridge is a founding member of the Order of Cosmic Engineers and is distantly related to Commodore William Bainbridge.