Scott Atran (born February 6, 1952) is an American-French cultural anthropologist who is Emeritus Director of Research in Anthropology at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris, Research Professor at the University of Michigan, and cofounder of ARTIS International and of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford University. He has studied and written about terrorism, violence, religion, indigenous environmental management and the cross-cultural foundations of biological classification; and he has done fieldwork with terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists, as well as political leaders and Native American peoples.

Atran was born in New York City in 1952. He spent his formative years in Baltimore County, Maryland and Scott graduated from Milford Mill High School. While a student at Columbia University, he became assistant to anthropologist Margaret Mead at the American Museum of Natural History. He received his BA from Columbia College, MA from Johns Hopkins University, and PhD in anthropology from Columbia University.

Atran has taught at Cambridge University, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the École pratique des hautes études and École polytechnique in Paris, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He is emeritus research director in anthropology at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and member of the Jean Nicod Institute at the École normale supérieure. He is also research professor of public policy and psychology at the University of Michigan, founding fellow of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford University, and cofounder of ARTIS International. He was elected as a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

In 1974 he originated a debate at the Royaumont Abbey in France on the nature of universals in human thought and society. Other participants included linguist Noam Chomsky, psychologist Jean Piaget, anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and biologists François Jacob and Jacques Monod. Howard Gardner and others consider this event a milestone in the development of cognitive science and its integration into the wider scientific community.

Atran has experimented on the ways scientists and ordinary people categorize and reason about nature, on the evolutionary psychology and cognitive science of religion, and on the limits of rationality in understanding and managing deep-seated cultural and political conflict. His work has been widely published internationally in the popular press, and in scientific journals in a variety of disciplines. He has briefed members of the US Congress and the National Security Council staff with documents and presentations including "The Devoted Actor versus the Rational Actor in World Conflict", "Comparative Anatomy and Evolution of Global Network Terrorism" and "Pathways to and from Violent Extremism". He was an early critic of U.S. intervention in Iraq and of deepening involvement in Afghanistan. In April 2015, he addressed the United Nations Security Council on "Youth, Peace, and Security."

Atran has also been a staunch opponent of political attempts to eliminate government funding for social science, arguing that it is critical to the national interest, including innovation and security in business, technology, medicine and defense.

Atran has published research on the limits of rational choice in political and cultural conflict.

He has collaborated on research on how political negotiations could be made more likely to produce agreement. Atran and the psychologists Jeremy Ginges and Douglas Medin and political scientist Khalil Shikaki conducted an experiment that surveyed "600 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, more than 500 Palestinian refugees, and more than 700 Palestinian students, half of whom identified with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad." The researchers divided the subjects into three groups, each presented with a different "hypothetical peace deal." In the basic situation, those surveyed were presented with "a two-state solution in which the Israelis would withdraw from 99 percent of the West Bank and Gaza but would not have to absorb Palestinian refugees"; the proposal "did not go over well." For the second group, the hypothetical deal "was sweetened with cash compensation from the United States and the European Union, such as a billion dollars a year for a hundred years, or a guarantee that the people would live in peace and prosperity. With these sweeteners on the table, the nonabsolutists, as expected, softened their opposition a bit. But the absolutists, forced to contemplate a taboo tradeoff, were even more disgusted, angry, and prepared to resort to violence." But for the third group, the proposed two-state solution was "augmented with a purely symbolic declaration by the enemy in which it compromised on one of its sacred values."