Author: vaughanbell

The New York Times has an opinion piece arguing that the rise of behavioural economics has led to the science being championed by politicians who want a soft option to avoid marking hard political decisions.

The authors are economist George Loewenstein and behavioural scientist Peter Ubel who list a range of behavioural economics-inspired policies which they claim have been used to give the impression of substantive action when the most effective form of behaviour change happens through painful tax and regulation.

Our over-reliance on behavioral economics is not limited to health care. A “gallons-per-mile” bill recently passed by the New York State Senate is intended to help drivers think more clearly about the fuel consumption of the vehicles they purchase; research has shown that gallons-per-mile is a more effective means of getting drivers to appreciate the realities of fuel consumption than the traditional miles-per-gallon.

But more and better information fails to get at the core of the problem: people drive large, energy-inefficient cars because gas is still relatively cheap. An increase in the gas tax that made the price of gas reflect its true costs would be a far more effective — though much more politically painful — way to reduce fuel consumption.

For example, the price of alcohol has been found to reliably influence national levels of death from liver disease, drink-driving levels and violent crime but politicians in many countries are loath to raise taxes.

This is not to say that raising taxes is always the preferred option, but the NYT piece raises some uncomfortable points for policy-makers who claimed to be ‘coming down hard’ on certain behaviours while avoiding the most effective solutions.

It’s probably also important to note that they authors don’t dismiss behavioural economics, just that it should complement and not replace other forms of policy-making.

Link to NYT piece ‘Economics Behaving Badly’ (via @mjrobbins).

3QuarksDaily has a fantastic article that examines how certain models became hot property during catwalk season by looking at the behavioural economics of fashion show buzz and why the success of top models is as much down to herd instinct as personal magnetism.

The piece is written by sociologist Ashley Mears, a model herself, who has been studying how the personal demands of the profession mesh and conflict with both the market for beautiful faces and the social world of the fashion industry.

The fashion modeling market also has a formal mechanism in place, known as the ‚Äúoption,‚Äù to ensure all tastemakers get in on the action. An option is an agreement between client and agent that enables the client to place a hold on the model‚Äôs future availability. Like options trading in finance markets, an option gives the buyer the right, but not the obligation, to make a purchase…

Options serve the symbolic purpose of ‚Äúsignaling‚Äù the model‚Äôs popularity to all other clients. During castings, clients are likely to ask models, ‚ÄúWhich shows are you optioned for,‚Äù thereby letting them know their competitors‚Äô tastes. Modeling agents drum up buzz using options as selling points too, as in, ‚ÄúRussell Marsh just optioned Coco Rocha for Prada!‚Äù To most fashion designers‚Äô ears, such words sound like warm honey; they greatly reduce the anxiety of having to sort Coco from 599 other striking teenagers…

In the language of economic sociology, options are performative; they create what they putatively just describe. In other words, the models have agency (that’s market models we’re talking about, not the fashion models, heaven’s no!). Options enable investors to anticipate other investors’ actions, which spurs herding behavior, where actors decide to disregard their own information (i.e., “That Coco Rocha, urgh!”) and imitate instead the decisions taken by others before them (but Russell Marsh optioned her).

One of Mears’ earlier studies looked at how models manage the stress of being treated as a commodity by the fashion market while trying to maintain their individuality, self-composure and emotional well-being.

Link to 3QD piece ‘How Supermodels Are like Toxic Assets’.

Neuroanthropology tackles a recent psychology article which highlights the fact that the vast majority of research is done on Western students, who, in global terms, are a very unusual subgroup of the human race.

This group has been given the catchy acronym WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) although the problem is not so much that students are being studied but that researchers tend to draw conclusions about ‘human nature’ from this data, seemingly unaware of how unrepresentative they are of the world’s population.

The Neuroanthropology has an interesting take on the debate, noting that although important, the differences highlighted by the original article may also be a result of cultural bias themselves:

For example, when I brought one of my Brazilian subjects to an American university at which I previously taught, his characterization of the American students‚Äô differences from young Brazilians with whom he had more contact focused on none of these traits (W. E. I. R. or D.). He was more struck by their large size (both height and BMI, to put it nicely), their frumpy androgynous clothing (anyone here not wearing a sweatshirt?), their materialism, their clumsiness and physical ineptitude, and their ethnic and personal homogeneity. If my Brazilian colleague were to characterize the oddness of the WEIRD, he wouldn‚Äôt focus on the traits Henrich and colleagues have chosen in their designation…

I don’t think that my point is a fundamental disagreement with Henrich and colleagues, but a concern that the parameter of difference we choose to highlight, even in the simplest designation, might itself be a culturally-generated bias. Anthropologists are well acquainted with having our subjects point to traits that are invisible to the Western research as ‘the crucial’ characteristic for understanding the gap. For example, ‘rich’ may seem an obvious contrast to poverty, but we know that not all ‘poverty’ is the same, nor are all ‘rich’ people able to experience in the same way their material situation. Some economists have argued that inequality is more crucial for understanding the experience of deprivation, for example, than absolute wealth. And poor populations often fix, not on their material deprivation, but on other qualities to describe their difference from the wealthy (or the WEIRD). For example, religious differences, family dynamics, or caste might be salient to people from other cultural backgrounds.

This blind spot seems quite pervasive which is only something that has become clear to me since working in Latin America. For example, most science is published in English and reviewers of scientific papers will often suggest tests or analyses which don’t exist or aren’t relevant to a Spanish speaking population.

Furthermore, journal editors rarely feel it necessary to recruit reviewers familiar with the culture in which the study was completed, assuming that American or European experience applies ‘globally’.

For example, a researcher from London or New York would never have their work assessed by someone who had no knowledge of psychological assessments in those countries but this happens all the time to cognitive scientists from the rest of the world, meaning much less of this work gets published.

There is also the ‘world music’ effect, where anything from America or Europe is considered mainstream where anything from the rest of the world is considered to be about ‘culture’.

The Neuroanthropology piece is an in-depth discussion of the whether psychology research has a truly global vision, and, most importantly, where our unrecognised blind spots may lie.

Link to Neuroanthropology on WEIRD research.
pdf of research article ‘The weirdest people in the world?’

New York Magazine has a truly excellent article on why having children tends to make people less happy. This result has come up in numerous studies but the article carefully explores this counter-intuitive finding in all the depth it deserves, reflecting on the changing culture and expectations of parenting.

The article starts with this lovely bit of academic trivia:

The idea that parents are less happy than nonparents has become so commonplace in academia that it was big news last year when the Journal of Happiness Studies published a Scottish paper declaring the opposite was true. “Contrary to much of the literature,” said the introduction, “our results are consistent with an effect of children on life satisfaction that is positive, large and increasing in the number of children.” Alas, the euphoria was short-lived. A few months later, the poor author discovered a coding error in his data, and the publication ran an erratum. “After correcting the problem,”it read,“the main results of the paper no longer hold. The effect of children on the life satisfaction of married individuals is small, often negative, and never statistically significant.”

However, the article questions what it means to say someone is ‘happy’ or ‘satisfied’ with their life and explores whether these studies are genuinely measuring the rich experience of parenting.

The piece explores how cultural expectations of parenting, and indeed, childhood, have changed and what practical implications this has had for day-to-day childcare.

It is one of those rare articles that combines scientific studies with personal experiences, without confusing the two and while using each to complement the other.

In-depth, wonderfully written and worth putting time aside for.

Link to New York Magazine ‘All Joy and No Fun’