David Blanchflower Lecture

UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING MANAGEMENT SCHOOL WINTER LECTURE

University of Stirling Management School Professor David (Danny) Blanchflower will be delivering a guest lecture on Tuesday 2^nd December, where he will share his analysis and observations on the topic:

'How is the UK economy doing?’

Professor Blanchflower is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and was a former member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee.  He is currently an economic columnist for the New Statesman magazine, the Independent Newspaper, and a contributing editor of Bloomberg Television.

The event is taking place in lecture theatre A4 (Cottrell Building), commencing at 5.00pm for a 5.15pm start.  We are inviting a broad spectrum of leading figures representing private, public and third sector organisations, including many alumni.  Both staff and students are encouraged to attend, and we would be grateful if you could assist by promoting this event to your students during lectures/seminars.  We will be hosting a drinks reception following the lecture at 6.15pm, and we would be delighted if you could stay to join us for this.

Please RSVP before Tuesday 25^th November, via management@stir.ac.uk or 01786 467415. 

We very much hope that you will be able to attend what should be a very interesting evening.

Links 10.11.14

1. Striving for a Climate Change (Chronicle Review)
- Professor Dan Kahan, whose work has been profiled on Vox, on the difficulty of communicating scientific information to groups who don't want to hear about it.

2. How to use dice to stop people from lying on surveys (i09)

3. A previously unpublished work by Isaac Asimov on "How do people get new ideas"?

4. Bavel, Hackel & Xiao (2014), The Group Mind: The Pervasive Influence of Social Identity on Cognition, New Frontiers in Social Neuroscience
Abstract: Humans evolved in social groups and are adapted for group living. In this chapter, we review recent behavioral, physiological, and neuroscience research that provides the psychological and neural architecture for collectively shared representations of the world – the “group mind.” We describe how collective identities structure a wide range of human cognitive processes, from rapid evaluation and face memory to mental state attribution and representations of physical distance. This research underscores how psychological and neural processes underlying human cognition are context-dependent, dynamic, and flexibly shaped by motivational states, rather than inevitable, reflexive, and fixed.

5. A wonderful interactive visualization of time-use survey data (NYTimes)

Summary of Emotion Lecture

I am currently giving a set of lectures as part of a module "Behavioural Economic: Concepts and Theories" in Stirling. I am posting brief informal summaries of some of these lectures on the blog to generate discussion. Thanks to Mark Egan for a lot of help in putting these together online.

This lecture covered Emotions and Decision-Making. There were four main threads, summarized briefly below:

(i) Emotions and Perception
The first idea is that emotions can influence decisions through altering temporarily altering perceptions of benefits, costs, intertemporal tradeoffs and risks. The main article for this is the Loewenstein article on visceral effects. In this sense, emotions are seen as acting as barriers to fully rational decisions. There is a strong link back to the topic of intertemporal choice as visceral effects can be seen as the underlying cause for why we place such a heavy weight on the immediate present.

(ii) Emotions and Economic Behaviour
The second idea is that emotions play an important role in how people behave in economic interactions. In particular, emotions such as anger, spite and indignation may lead people to make decisions that are different to predictions from rational choice. For example, people frequently reject lower than 50-50 amounts in the Ultimatum game. One reason for this is that they feel slighted by an unfair offer.

Here is a video showing two monkeys co-operating with each other even though the dominant strategy for the second would have been to keep all the stuff. This video shows the "cucumber-grape" demonstration I was telling you about where one monkey becomes enraged when the other monkey is rewarded with a better prize for doing the same task. These studies show that monkeys, as well as humans, process unfairness in this fashion.

I also talked about a famous neuroeconomic study which shows that brain areas associated with the limbic system light up when people are presented with unfair offers and that this predicts rejection of the offer.


(iii) Rational Emotions
The third idea, related to the second, is that emotions may themselves be influenced by rational considerations. In this sense, even extreme emotions such as hatred, anger, outrage etc., can be thought of as methods for coordinating interest groups in political bargaining games. The main article for this on the reading list is The Political Economy of Hatred by Edward Glaeser.

(iv) Emotions & the future
The fourth main idea is that we are bad at predicting how our emotions will respond to changes in events, an area of study called affective forecasting. Related to this is the focusing illusion which can be summarized by Kahenman's quote "Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it" - basically people tend to overproject their present affective states into the future, without correcting for future changes in circumstances or perspective. This paper about the "focusing illusion" by Kahneman and colleagues is one of the simplest and most useful in this area. The paper argues that income does not make us happier even though we act on the basis that it does. They claim this is due to a pervasive feature of human predictions of their emotional response which is a variant of the representativeness heuristic.

Readings:
Elster (1984), Ulysses and the Sirens, Cambridge University Press.
Elster (1996), Rationality and the Emotions, Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society.
Elster (1998), Emotions and economic theory, Journal of Economic Literature.
Glaeser (2005), The Political Economy of Hatred, The Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Kahneman et al. (2006), Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion, Science.
Loewenstein (1996), Out of control: visceral influences on behavior, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
Loewenstein (2000), Emotions in economic theory and economic behavior, American Economic Review
Sanfey et al. (2003), The Neural Basis of Economic Decision-Making in the Ultimatum Game, Science.
Wilson & Gilbert (2003), Affective forecasting, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology.

3-Year Lectureship in Behavioural Science

The Stirling Management School is seeking to appoint an outstanding lecturer in Behavioural Science to drive our research and teaching in this area for a three-year research intensive contract. This is an excellent opportunity to develop a coherent research strategy in behavioural science and contribute to an ambitious research centre. The successful candidate will have a minimum 40 per cent protected research time and be supported in publishing outstanding research in leading peer reviewed outlets, will contribute to teaching and supervision on the MSc in Behavioural Science and will be responsible for the delivery of a behavioural economics module at undergraduate level. The candidate will be strongly supported in developing their own research agenda and will work alongside a growing stream of experienced and early career researchers in the area of behavioural science.

Established in 2012, the Behavioural Sciences Centre is an interdisciplinary research centre which brings together approaches from economics, psychology, and medicine to address the key questions in society, such as how to better understand and foster economic and industrial prosperity, decision making and behaviour, and health and well-being. The centre pursues these goals through basic science and applied research, educational programmes, and industrial collaborations. The post-holder will be part of the Behavioural Science Centre and also affiliated to one of our four main School Divisions: Marketing; Economics; Management, Work and Organisation; and Accountancy and Finance. The initial contract is for three years with the possibility of review at the end of this period.

Details of how to apply are available here. Closing date for applications is midnight on Wednesday, 19th November 2014

BSPID 2015 will take place on Friday April 10 in York

The 6th annual conference of the British Society for the Psychology of Individual Differences will take place in York's Kings Manor on Friday April 10th, 2015. Further details are available here. I attended BSPID last year and thought it was a very friendly group of researchers with interesting talks. Registration fees are modest making it a good option for early-career psychology researchers interested in individual differences.

Abstract submissions "from any area of research with relevance to individual differences psychology" must be submitted by March 1st. See the above link for submission details.

Launch of What Works Centre for Wellbeing

Via ESRC website - full details available here 

A new centre is being set up to gather and share evidence on what works to improve wellbeing. The independent What Works Centre for Wellbeing is the latest addition to the What Works Network, launched by the Government last year to improve public services through evidence-based policy. 

Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Public Health England and other partners, including government departments, the centre will become operational next spring, when grants will be awarded to universities to research the impact that different interventions and services have on wellbeing. 

The initial focus of research will be on the themes of work, communities and culture. The results will help government, councils, health and wellbeing boards, charities and businesses make decisions and choices informed by what the evidence says really matters for the wellbeing of people, communities and the nation as a whole. 

To mark the launch of the What Works Centre for Wellbeing, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills published complementary research on employee wellbeing, what workplace factors influence it and how wellbeing affects performance.

Irish Government Economic Evaluation Service on Behavioural Economics

The Irish Civil Service established an economic evaluation service in 2012 "to enhance the role of economics and value for money analysis in public policy making". Interestingly, they have recently published a document on the role of behavioural economics in policy-making in Ireland. This is available on this link.