Jonathan Haidt: belief

Transcript context

…You’re a trained psychologist, in addition to your most famous work, you have a lot of other papers which are very well cited, but less famous for other public intellectuals doing what you’d call traditional psychological research. Here we have these economists, they do what they call behavioral economics, and they tread into the field of psychology, do they know what they’re doing? Behavioral economics, underrated or overrated? Properly rated right now, with one caveat. We psychologists have long felt, “Oh those economists they’re the only ones that are ever consulted in Congress, and they have all these high‑prestige jobs, they have a Nobel Prize, nobody listens to us.” Some economists beginning with Robert Frank, and Dan Kahneman, Dick Thaler, the fact that economists have been listening to psychologists, and making our work more well‑known, of course Kahneman did a lot of that work, and he is a psychologist. That’s all good, I’m thrilled with the way that’s going. The only caveat that I would put which I would say if they don’t do this soon, then they would be overrated, is the behavioral economics work is an example of this wonderful dictum from Robert Zajonc, the famous social psychologist, which is that cognitive psychology is social psychology with all the interesting variables set to zero. To the extent that behavioral economists are saying, “Look at a person shopping, what influences their decision? If the apple is at eye‑level — .” They’re looking at lone consumers who are trying to make choices to optimize their outcomes. That’s great work, but that’s setting all the interesting variables to zero. The interesting stuff is all social. It’s what does this say about me? Will I be ostracized from my group? If behavioral economics becomes more social, which I think will be the next phase, then I would say it would deserve ever‑rising market value. Thorstein Veblen, that was his initial vision for it actually, was that it be quite social and that the idea of a social reference class was central to people’s behavioral biases.…

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