The results of the assessment exercise that occurs in the UK every 5 years or so to assess the quality of research being conducted in universities came out before Christmas. You are either very familiar with or, if not, type "Research Excellence Framework" into google or twitter and it will give you a feel for it. Our Management School did well with a wide proposal with over 40 academics across areas such as retail studies, environmental economics, labour economics, accounting, culture and marketing, social marketing and behavioural science. Our ranking went to 25/26 from 101 places submitting compared to 48 from 90 in the previous round. There are numerous critiques of REF but the basic data confirms there is at very least a substantial body of research being carried out here that stands up to an extra external review (on top of journal peer review) and the result is basically good news for our students and academics.
One thing we are particularly keen on stressing in the research centre is that we are part of a Management School and it is worth discussing this a lot more in 2015. Part of my role in the School since 2011 has been to act as "Director of Research" which can feel like an odd role to be honest but means I spend a lot of time reading funding proposals, being on hiring committees, reviewing ethics and various other things and this has given me an interesting perspective across all aspects of a Management School.
The first thing is to stress is that disciplinary location is not everything. Individual academics form networks nationally and internationally through many different mechanisms and the extent of internal collaboration varies massively by academic and institution. However, the disciplinary background that a centre like this emerges from will impact on things like ability to provide different types of programme and the many very practical things when forming a research group such as being able to have well-attended seminars, attracting staff and students, being aligned to hiring objectives and on, a basic level, the type of corridor talk that potentially leads to new ideas and collaborations.
One obvious place to develop a behavioural science centre would be in a Psychology or Economics department, with the main advantage being the tie to a core discipline. In our case, one of our four divisions is an Economics division and is linked to the wider Scottish network with obvious advantages on that side. A key naturally emerging aspect of the link to Economics is the distinction between some people who view their PhD as being Economics and some who explicitly want to be viewed as conducting a Behavioural Science PhD with the lines often being reasonably clear and often blurred. On the psychology side, several of our group are psychologists and collaborate extensively with people in psychology departments. There is definitely a lot of interesting discussion about the difference between a behavioural science centre in a Management School and a Psychology department which has specialist applied areas. There are also many collaborative possibilities and we have certainly been collaborating a lot in this regard.
I think there are a number of interesting advantages to being located in a management school. There are obviously many well-worked out examples of this in top US business/management schools (see links to many of them here) where behavioural economics is rapidly becoming part of the status quo. In the UK, places like Warwick, Nottingham, and East Anglia have built concentrations in this area and there are now a number of MSc and PhD programmes (including our own) being offered through Management/Business Schools. In our case, we have four key academic divisions in our School: Marketing/Retail, Accounting, Economics and Management. All four disciplines are fertile ground for interesting applications of behavioural economics and we are starting to see several MSc and even PhD students developing interests that bring behavioural insights into these areas. We also have a number of research centres including: on the future of Scotland and the UK in the context of the referendum and post-referendum; an Institute for Retail Studies; a Centre for Consumers and Culture; a Centre on Surveillance and Privacy; and are building new centres in aging, applied micro, employment and sustainable business. Cross-over research and supervision between research centres (and even just basic corridor talk) is one of the things that is potentially exciting about developing a behavioural research centre in a management school. It is hard to go a week without seeing something that could develop into a worthwhile and interesting project in this regard. Some of our existing students are working on behavioural aspects of financial products, behavioural economics and Human Resources and several other projects. I have had a lot of discussions this year with students and potential students interested in things like the behavioural economics of privacy or town planning and I think there is a lot of potential to develop more cross-over projects.
One of the key advantages of being in a Management School is we are basically teaching hundreds of future managers every year. One exciting thing for me has always been the idea that behavioural science injects a lot of humanity into the training of Management students. It encourages a critical understanding of how human beings behave and, in particular, encourages a very keen eye on the details of how organisations work in terms of communication, interfaces and many other aspects that can subtly influence behaviour and outcomes. Taught well I think it also encourages a real appreciation of ethical issues in influencing behaviour and also a good sense of where regulation is going at least in places like the UK and US in the next few years. There are plenty of other ways in which management courses cultivate these aspects but behavioural science feels like a real addition to these. One of the courses I will be teaching from January is called "Behavioural Science for Managers" and will be offered for the first time across all the School. I regularly get emails from students going back to when I started teaching versions of these courses in 2007 to psychology and economics students about how they have applied some of the ideas. It will be interesting to see how they are taken on by 100s of management and business students. We are also actively discussing how other modules we have developed specifically just for Behavioural Science students are relevant across many areas of management and these are some of the most stimulating discussions I have had since coming here.
It would be good to talk more in 2015 about the evolution of a behavioural research centre in the context of a Management School and what potential opportunities that opens up for research and teaching and I hope the above gets the ball rolling.
Monday, December 29, 2014
Gerd Gigerenzer – Risk Savvy
"Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion,
Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessary to Human existence.” – William
Blake
Gerd Gigerenzer is best known as Daniel Kahneman’s
fiery intellectual opponent. Kahneman’s research programme is known as
“heuristics and biases”, which has found many scenarios where automatic
thinking leads to decision-making errors. Gigerenzer researches “fast
and frugal heuristics” – understanding when simplistic
decision-making strategies can nonetheless lead to good outcomes. Kahneman’s popular science book “Thinking fast and slow”
has been a great hit for spreading behavioural science. “Risk savvy” is
Gigerenzer’s latest popular science book.
Gigerenzer’s broad message is that non-experts can
often be surprisingly good at making decisions. For example, when guessing the
relative sizes of cities, people are often more accurate for other countries
than their own. The simple “recognition
heuristic” can be employed and is surprisingly accurate if a
German is guessing which city out of Detroit or Milwaukee is bigger, but can’t
be used by an American who knows both cities.
Risky Savvy presents many of the key results from
Gigerenzer’s research, often with demonstrations in the key applied domains of
medical and financial decision making. While it might seem natural to outsource
key decisions in these domains to experts, ie doctors and financial advisers,
potential conflicts of interest might mean this is not always wise. Gigerenzer
presents evidence on how to make better decisions in these domains, e.g.
understanding the
statistical nature of breast and prostate cancer screening,
and how naive
diversification strategies can outperform more complex techniques.
The discussion between Kahneman and Gigerenzer, on
whether human decision-making is riddled with errors or is surprisingly
efficient, is best summarised in two theoretical articles published in
Psychological Review: Kahneman
and Tversky (1996); Gigerenzer
(1996). These articles are well-worth reading, but suffice
to say the debate has at times been rather heated between the two theoretical
positions.
But while reading through Risk Savvy, it struck me
how for practical purposes the gap between Kahneman and Gigerenzer seems to be
narrowing. Institutions and individuals often do not make optimal decisions.
Advocates of nudging (who generally come from the Kahneman school) often stress
the
benefits of simplification, similar to the message that
Gigerenzer has been preaching for many years. And likewise, Gigerenzer stresses
in Risk Savvy institutional limitations to good decision making, which is what choice
architects and other researchers in behavioural economics have been arguing.
While not explicitly advocating nudging, Gigerenzer recommends a programme of
risk literacy interventions to help debias many of the errors that he discusses
in Risk Savvy. While choice architects would point to the limitations of
information-based interventions, and argue for stronger measures (such as default
options), both parties are in agreement that something should be done to help
ordinary decision-makers.
Sunday, December 14, 2014
Mind, Society and Behaviour: new 236 page report from the World Bank
Christmas has come early for Behavioural Science nerds in the form of this 236 page report by the World Bank entitled "Mind, Society and Behaviour". This report will likely end up being a staple of reading lists in Behavioural Science masters programs everywhere. The overview and index are highlighted below:
Overview [p21-22]
"This Report aims to integrate recent findings on the psychological and social underpinnings of behavior to make them available for more systematic use by both researchers and practitioners in development communities. The Report draws on findings from many disciplines, including neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, behavioral economics, sociology, political science, and anthropology. In ongoing research, these findings help explain decisions that individuals make in many aspects of development, including savings, investment, energy consumption, health, and child rearing. The findings also enhance the understanding of how collective behaviors - such as widespread trust or widespread corruption—develop and become entrenched in a society. The findings apply not only to individuals in developing countries but also to development professionals, who are themselves prone to error when decision-making contexts are complex.
From the hundreds of empirical papers on human decision making that form the basis of this Report, three principles stand out as providing the direction for new approaches to understanding behavior and designing and implementing development policy. First, people make most judgments and most choices automatically, not deliberatively: we call this “thinking automatically.” Second, how people act and think often depends on what others around them do and think: we call this “thinking socially.” Third, individuals in a given society share a common perspective on making sense of the world around them and understanding themselves: we call this “thinking with mental models.
The mind, society, and behavior framework points to new tools for achieving development objectives, as well as new means of increasing the effectiveness of existing interventions. It provides more entry points for policy and new tools that practitioners can draw on in their efforts to reduce poverty and increase shared prosperity. This Report discusses how taking the human factors more completely into account in decision making sheds light on a number of areas: the persistence of poverty, early childhood development, household finance, productivity, health, and climate change. The framework and many examples in the Report show how impediments to people’s ability to process information and the ways societies shape mindsets can be sources of development disadvantage but also can be changed."
Index
Overview: Human decision making and development policy
5 Three principles of human decision making
13 Psychological and social perspectives on policy
18 The work of development professionals
21 References
24 Part 1: An expanded understanding of human behavior for economic development: A conceptual framework
25 Introduction
26 Chapter 1: Thinking automatically
26 Two systems of thinking
29 Biases in assessing information
34 Biases in assessing value
36 Choice architecture
37 Overcoming intention-action divides
38 Conclusion
38 Notes
39 References
42 Chapter 2: Thinking socially
43 Social preferences and their implications
49 The influence of social networks on individual decision making
51 The role of social norms in individual decision making
54 Conclusion
55 Notes
55 References
60 Spotlight 1: When corruption is the norm
62 Chapter 3: Thinking with mental models
63 Where mental models come from and why they matter
63 How mental models work and how we use them
65 The roots of mental models
67 The effects of making an identity salient
68 The staying power of mental models
70 Policies to improve the match of mental models with a decision context
72 Conclusion
72 Notes
73 References
76 Spotlight 2: Entertainment education
79 Part 2: Psychological and social perspectives on policy
80 Chapter 4: Poverty
81 Poverty consumes cognitive resources
84 Poverty creates poor frames
85 Social contexts of poverty can generate their own taxes
86 Implications for the design of antipoverty policies and programs
90 Looking ahead
91 References
94 Spotlight 3: How well do we understand the contexts of poverty?
98 Chapter 5: Early childhood development
99 Richer and poorer children differ greatly in school readiness
100 Children need multiple cognitive and noncognitive skills to succeed in school
101 Poverty in infancy and early childhood can impede early brain development
101 Parents are crucial in supporting the development of children’s capacities for learning
103 Parents’ beliefs and caregiving practices differ across groups, with consequences for children’s developmental outcomes
104 Designing interventions that focus on and improve parental competence
108 Conclusion
108 Notes
109 References
112 Chapter 6: Household finance
113 The human decision maker in finance
117 Policies to improve the quality of household financial decisions
123 Conclusion
123 Notes
123 References
128 Chapter 7: Productivity
129 Improving effort among employees
134 Recruiting high-performance employees
135 Improving the performance of small businesses
136 Increasing technology adoption in agriculture
139 Using these insights in policy design
140 Notes
140 References
144 Spotlight 4: Using ethnography to understand the workplace
146 Chapter 8: Health
146 Changing health behaviors in the face of psychological biases and social influences
149 Psychological and social approaches to changing health behavior
151 Improving follow-through and habit formation
153 Encouraging health care providers to do the right things for others
155 Conclusion
155 Notes
156 References
160 Chapter 9: Climate change
161 Cognitive obstacles inhibit action on climate change
167 Psychological and social insights for motivating conservation
171 Conclusion
171 Notes
171 References
176 Spotlight 5: Promoting water conservation in Colombia
179 Part 3: Improving the work of development professionals
180 Chapter 10: The biases of development professionals
181 Complexity
182 Confirmation bias
185 Sunk cost bias
186 The effects of context on judgment and decision making
189 Conclusion
190 Notes
190 References
192 Chapter 11: Adaptive design, adaptive interventions
194 Diagnosing psychological and social obstacles
195 Designing an intervention
198 Experimenting during implementation
199 Conclusion: Learning and adapting
199 References
202 Spotlight 6: Why should governments shape individual choices?
205 Index
Overview [p21-22]
"This Report aims to integrate recent findings on the psychological and social underpinnings of behavior to make them available for more systematic use by both researchers and practitioners in development communities. The Report draws on findings from many disciplines, including neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, behavioral economics, sociology, political science, and anthropology. In ongoing research, these findings help explain decisions that individuals make in many aspects of development, including savings, investment, energy consumption, health, and child rearing. The findings also enhance the understanding of how collective behaviors - such as widespread trust or widespread corruption—develop and become entrenched in a society. The findings apply not only to individuals in developing countries but also to development professionals, who are themselves prone to error when decision-making contexts are complex.
From the hundreds of empirical papers on human decision making that form the basis of this Report, three principles stand out as providing the direction for new approaches to understanding behavior and designing and implementing development policy. First, people make most judgments and most choices automatically, not deliberatively: we call this “thinking automatically.” Second, how people act and think often depends on what others around them do and think: we call this “thinking socially.” Third, individuals in a given society share a common perspective on making sense of the world around them and understanding themselves: we call this “thinking with mental models.
The mind, society, and behavior framework points to new tools for achieving development objectives, as well as new means of increasing the effectiveness of existing interventions. It provides more entry points for policy and new tools that practitioners can draw on in their efforts to reduce poverty and increase shared prosperity. This Report discusses how taking the human factors more completely into account in decision making sheds light on a number of areas: the persistence of poverty, early childhood development, household finance, productivity, health, and climate change. The framework and many examples in the Report show how impediments to people’s ability to process information and the ways societies shape mindsets can be sources of development disadvantage but also can be changed."
Index
Overview: Human decision making and development policy
5 Three principles of human decision making
13 Psychological and social perspectives on policy
18 The work of development professionals
21 References
24 Part 1: An expanded understanding of human behavior for economic development: A conceptual framework
25 Introduction
26 Chapter 1: Thinking automatically
26 Two systems of thinking
29 Biases in assessing information
34 Biases in assessing value
36 Choice architecture
37 Overcoming intention-action divides
38 Conclusion
38 Notes
39 References
42 Chapter 2: Thinking socially
43 Social preferences and their implications
49 The influence of social networks on individual decision making
51 The role of social norms in individual decision making
54 Conclusion
55 Notes
55 References
60 Spotlight 1: When corruption is the norm
62 Chapter 3: Thinking with mental models
63 Where mental models come from and why they matter
63 How mental models work and how we use them
65 The roots of mental models
67 The effects of making an identity salient
68 The staying power of mental models
70 Policies to improve the match of mental models with a decision context
72 Conclusion
72 Notes
73 References
76 Spotlight 2: Entertainment education
79 Part 2: Psychological and social perspectives on policy
80 Chapter 4: Poverty
81 Poverty consumes cognitive resources
84 Poverty creates poor frames
85 Social contexts of poverty can generate their own taxes
86 Implications for the design of antipoverty policies and programs
90 Looking ahead
91 References
94 Spotlight 3: How well do we understand the contexts of poverty?
98 Chapter 5: Early childhood development
99 Richer and poorer children differ greatly in school readiness
100 Children need multiple cognitive and noncognitive skills to succeed in school
101 Poverty in infancy and early childhood can impede early brain development
101 Parents are crucial in supporting the development of children’s capacities for learning
103 Parents’ beliefs and caregiving practices differ across groups, with consequences for children’s developmental outcomes
104 Designing interventions that focus on and improve parental competence
108 Conclusion
108 Notes
109 References
112 Chapter 6: Household finance
113 The human decision maker in finance
117 Policies to improve the quality of household financial decisions
123 Conclusion
123 Notes
123 References
128 Chapter 7: Productivity
129 Improving effort among employees
134 Recruiting high-performance employees
135 Improving the performance of small businesses
136 Increasing technology adoption in agriculture
139 Using these insights in policy design
140 Notes
140 References
144 Spotlight 4: Using ethnography to understand the workplace
146 Chapter 8: Health
146 Changing health behaviors in the face of psychological biases and social influences
149 Psychological and social approaches to changing health behavior
151 Improving follow-through and habit formation
153 Encouraging health care providers to do the right things for others
155 Conclusion
155 Notes
156 References
160 Chapter 9: Climate change
161 Cognitive obstacles inhibit action on climate change
167 Psychological and social insights for motivating conservation
171 Conclusion
171 Notes
171 References
176 Spotlight 5: Promoting water conservation in Colombia
179 Part 3: Improving the work of development professionals
180 Chapter 10: The biases of development professionals
181 Complexity
182 Confirmation bias
185 Sunk cost bias
186 The effects of context on judgment and decision making
189 Conclusion
190 Notes
190 References
192 Chapter 11: Adaptive design, adaptive interventions
194 Diagnosing psychological and social obstacles
195 Designing an intervention
198 Experimenting during implementation
199 Conclusion: Learning and adapting
199 References
202 Spotlight 6: Why should governments shape individual choices?
205 Index
Understanding Confidence Intervals with an interactive visualization (from rpsychologist)
Another beautiful piece of work by Kristoffer Magnusson, who has previously created visualizations to aid understanding of Cohen's d, statistical power and significance testing and correlations.
Sunday, December 07, 2014
ESRC PhD Studentships Scottish Social Science
The deadline for applying for PhD funding from the ESRC is rapidly approaching. The link to apply to do it is here. For those wishing to apply to work with us in Stirling please see details of our current projects, publications and staff. Illustrative ongoing projects are below (with associated centre faculty in parentheses) but we welcome proposals from across our areas of expertise. We welcome applications from Economics, Advanced Quantitative Methods and Business/Management. We offer a PhD in Economics and a PhD in Behavioural Science both based in the Stirling School of Management. Those intending applying should get in touch with me as soon as possible. You should also check the residency requirements and other criteria to ensure you are eligible.
Self-Control and Health (Michael Daly and Liam Delaney)
Self-control enables people to delay gratification and control impulses. A strong capacity for self-control has been linked with nearly all aspects of healthy living: avoiding high fat and sugar foods, engaging in exercise, and staying clear of addictive substances. The proposed programme of research will provide scientific evidence detailing whether and how individual differences in childhood self-control contribute to the emergence of patterns of health behaviour and health problems over the lifespan. This project will capitalize on the existence of several large population-representative samples which track over 10,000 individuals for between 15 and 50 years with data recorded on multiple occasions from early life into adulthood. These incredible data resources include detailed measures of child temperament that will be used to gauge how childhood self-control shapes the uptake, maintenance and decline of smoking, drinking, physical activity, and substance use from adolescence through to middle age. Furthermore, this project will track how early life self-control links to later health outcomes (e.g. body mass index, biomarkers of inflammation and cardiovascular risk) and will begin to unpick the complex interrelationships between self-control, socioeconomic status, and the development of health.
The Rank Principle in Social and Cognitive Comparison (Alex Wood)
In everyday life, attitudes are formed and decisions are made on the basis of judgements. Am I satisfied with my wage? Does the UK accept too many asylum seekers? What length of prison sentence is appropriate for a given crime? What is the appropriate and fair level of taxation? It has long been known that such judgements are, typically, highly relative. The judgement that is reached or the decision that is made may be strongly determined by the context of options that is presented. For example, individuals' opinions about their wages are determined by comparing their own wage with that of others around them - a reference group effect. People's opinions about levels of immigration or the "fair" level of taxation can be strongly influenced by the information they are given about immigration or taxation levels in other European countries. The proposed research will develop and test a new rank-based approach to everyday judgement and decision-making. According to this approach, decisions are influenced by the rank-ordered position of an option in a distribution. For example, most people think that there are more very wealthy people in the UK (e.g. earning more than 100K) than there really are. We have found that individuals' satisfaction with their income is determined by where they perceive themselves to be in this assumed wage distribution, rather than by their position in the true UK wage distribution. In this interdisciplinary project, we will extend existing rank-based models to judgements about a variety of socially and politically important quantities.
Well-Being, Decision-Making and Unemployment in Europe (Liam Delaney and Michael Daly)
The aim of this three year project is to develop and test a model of unemployment, taking into account interactions between unemployment, well-being and inter-temporal decision making. The project will focus in particular on youth unemployment. Youth unemployment rates across Europe are currently at alarmingly high rates and traditional employment activation models are having very little success in a context of sluggish labour demand. Understanding, how the current rates of unemployment will lead to long-term unemployment and scarring among young people in Europe and potential responses is a key task for research and policy. The project utilises existing secondary datasets, such as the European Social Survey (ESS) to examine the linkages between well-being, unemployment and decision-making from the disciplinary perspectives of economics, epidemiology and psychology.
Individual Differences in the Impact of Socio-Economic Events on Health and Well-Being (Alex Wood and Christopher Boyce)
People's well-being, consisting of, for example, their health, happiness and overall satisfaction with life, is influenced by a wide variety of life events (e.g., income increases, marriage, and unemployment) as well as changes in the society in which they live (e.g., changes in national income and how equally that income is distributed). Our programme of research will show (a) the type of person who loses or gains the most well-being when these events take place, and (b) the psychological reasons as to why people's well-being changes after such events. Showing why, and for whom, socioeconomic events can have a large impact on well-being is important for understanding basic questions such as why some people are happier or more depressed than others. Such research can also help in understanding the impact of policy (for example, who will suffer the most if society becomes more unequal). We use already collected datasets which provide tens of thousands of people's responses, over several years, to questionnaires about themselves and their levels of well-being.
These well-being responses, as well as detailed medical information about their biological functioning, can be linked to specific events that people have encountered in their lives. We use these datasets to ask five key research questions, each with both theoretical and policy implications;
1. Do well-being reactions to socio-economic events (such as marriage or unemployment) depend on a person's personality prior to the event occurring? If so, this would suggest that certain people have predictably stronger or weaker reactions depending on their existing psychological characteristics, indicating who may need the most support following life events.
2. Whilst personality by definition represents quite stable psychological characteristics, here we ask whether personality changes in predictable and meaningful ways following life events. If personality is something that changes, then this suggests some potential for policy discussions and applied research to focus on how to create the conditions that allow for positive personality development.
3. Is a person's health and well-being influenced by their level of income, or rather by how their income ranks amongst other people (e.g., those in the same community)? If the latter is the case, then this has implications for understanding why the relationship between income and well-being exists, and may offer specific solutions as to how to reduce the negative effects of having a low income.
4. Does losing one pound of income have a proportionally greater impact on well-being than gaining one pound of income? Although intuitively "yes", calculations of the impact of income on well-being currently assume that income gains and losses impact equally on a person or a nation's well-being. This question has relevance to policies that prioritise the avoidance of income losses over stimulating income gains.
5. Do people have lower levels of well-being in less equal societies? Here, we explore whether the influence of positive and negative life events on well-being are different depending upon the level of inequality in a society, and whether this occurs due to low feelings of basic fairness and trust. This would contribute to debates as to the relative costs of allowing income to become more unequally distributed. The integration within our programme is the focus on showing how psychological characteristics are important for understanding how socio-economic circumstances influence well-being across these five broad areas. Our aim in answering these questions is to:
(a) contribute new answers to old theoretical questions in several fields
(b) encourage interdisciplinary collaboration in understanding the impact on well-being of socio-economic events
(c) feed into important policy debates
(d) suggest an increased role for psychologists to work alongside other social scientists in informing policy in this area.
Links 7.12.14
1. Israel et al. (2014), Credit scores, cardiovascular disease risk, and human capital, PNAS.
Abstract: Credit scores are the most widely used instruments to assess whether or not a person is a financial risk. ...we test if the same factors that lead to poor credit scores also lead to poor health. Following the Dunedin (New Zealand) Longitudinal Study cohort of 1,037 study members, we examined the association between credit scores and cardiovascular disease risk and the underlying factors that account for this association. We find that credit scores are negatively correlated with cardiovascular disease risk... Individual differences in human capital factors—educational attainment, cognitive ability, and self-control—predicted both credit scores and cardiovascular disease risk and accounted for 45% of the correlation between credit scores and cardiovascular disease risk. Tracing human capital factors back to their childhood antecedents revealed that the characteristic attitudes, behaviors, and competencies children develop in their first decade of life account for a significant portion (22%) of the link between credit scores and cardiovascular disease risk at midlife.
2. Three terrific posts from The Growth Economics Blog reviewing the literature on institutions and economic development.
3. Cohn et al (2014), Business culture and dishonesty in the banking industry, Nature
Abstract: Trust in others’ honesty is a key component of the long-term performance of firms, industries, and even whole countries. However, in recent years, numerous scandals involving fraud have undermined confidence in the financial industry. ...Here we show that employees of a large, international bank behave, on average, honestly in a control condition. However, when their professional identity as bank employees is rendered salient, a significant proportion of them become dishonest. This effect is specific to bank employees because control experiments with employees from other industries and with students show that they do not become more dishonest when their professional identity or bank-related items are rendered salient. Our results thus suggest that the prevailing business culture in the banking industry weakens and undermines the honesty norm, implying that measures to re-establish an honest culture are very important.
4. What Works? Evidence for decision makers: A new report from the UK government looking at what works (and doesn't) across many different interventions in health care, education, crime reduction and other major policy domains.
5. Diener, Oishi & Park (2014), An Incomplete List of Eminent Psychologists of the Modern Era, Archives of Scientific Psychology.
6. From the Behavioural Science Centre YouTube channel:
Abstract: Credit scores are the most widely used instruments to assess whether or not a person is a financial risk. ...we test if the same factors that lead to poor credit scores also lead to poor health. Following the Dunedin (New Zealand) Longitudinal Study cohort of 1,037 study members, we examined the association between credit scores and cardiovascular disease risk and the underlying factors that account for this association. We find that credit scores are negatively correlated with cardiovascular disease risk... Individual differences in human capital factors—educational attainment, cognitive ability, and self-control—predicted both credit scores and cardiovascular disease risk and accounted for 45% of the correlation between credit scores and cardiovascular disease risk. Tracing human capital factors back to their childhood antecedents revealed that the characteristic attitudes, behaviors, and competencies children develop in their first decade of life account for a significant portion (22%) of the link between credit scores and cardiovascular disease risk at midlife.
2. Three terrific posts from The Growth Economics Blog reviewing the literature on institutions and economic development.
3. Cohn et al (2014), Business culture and dishonesty in the banking industry, Nature
Abstract: Trust in others’ honesty is a key component of the long-term performance of firms, industries, and even whole countries. However, in recent years, numerous scandals involving fraud have undermined confidence in the financial industry. ...Here we show that employees of a large, international bank behave, on average, honestly in a control condition. However, when their professional identity as bank employees is rendered salient, a significant proportion of them become dishonest. This effect is specific to bank employees because control experiments with employees from other industries and with students show that they do not become more dishonest when their professional identity or bank-related items are rendered salient. Our results thus suggest that the prevailing business culture in the banking industry weakens and undermines the honesty norm, implying that measures to re-establish an honest culture are very important.
4. What Works? Evidence for decision makers: A new report from the UK government looking at what works (and doesn't) across many different interventions in health care, education, crime reduction and other major policy domains.
5. Diener, Oishi & Park (2014), An Incomplete List of Eminent Psychologists of the Modern Era, Archives of Scientific Psychology.
6. From the Behavioural Science Centre YouTube channel:
Friday, December 05, 2014
PhD Scholarships
See below from Dr. Michael Pluess:
The psychology department at Queen Mary University of London is recruiting motivated and talented candidates to compete for ESRC funded PhD studentships through the ESRC Doctoral Training Centre held jointly between Queen Mary and Goldsmiths, University of London. Candidates that want to apply for these studentships must have completed (or expect to complete by 1st Oct 2015) an ESRC-approved Masters course and meet UK residency requirements as set out by the ESRC (http://www.esrc.ac.uk/
Project 1: Life Course Predictors of Psychological Well-Being: A Positive Developmental Perspective
Much of the existing research in developmental psychology has been and is being conducted from a perspective of developmental psychopathology. As a consequence, a lot is known today about the development of maladaptive outcomes, or when things “go wrong”, but it is less clear how development looks like when everything “goes right”. Yet focusing on the development of positive outcomes and competence is of great importance in order to foster and promote well-being across the life-course. This project aims at investigating positive development and predictors of psychological well-being across early childhood through to adulthood using a selection of large-scale longitudinal data sets (secondary data analysis).
For more information see: http://www.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk/
Project 2: Biomarkers of Subjective Vitality
Subjective Vitality, “a state of feeling alive and alert” (Ryan & Deci, 2001) is an important aspect of eudaimonic well-being. However, its precise contribution to psychological and physical health and well-being is not well understood. The aim of the current project is to examine how subjective vitality might be implicated in these outcomes, with a particular focus on identifying biomarkers of vitality.
Using existing data from large-scale longitudinal studies (i.e., secondary data analysis), this project will examine the (bi-)directional relationship(s) between subjective vitality, biomarkers measured in the blood (e.g., C-reactive protein) and various psychological and physical health well-being indicators (e.g., emotionality, lung function).
For more information see: http://www.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk/
Project 3: Social Groups, Resilience, Health & Well-being
Stress is a pervasive feature of modern life. This is particularly troubling given the negative implications of stress for mental and physical health and well-being (e.g. depression, anxiety, sleep disruption, illness, premature aging) and for decision making and behaviour (e.g. poor performance, smoking, excessive drinking). The focus of the present research is on how social connections contribute to stress management and reduction under different circumstances. We already know that people who report having many (versus only a few) social connections exhibit lower levels of depression, anxiety, and psychological distress and make fewer negative self-evaluations. This PhD project will seek to identify and test the psychological and/or biological mechanism(s) through which social connections can promote resilience, health and well-being when facing stressors.
For more information see: http://www.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk/
Interested applicants must send a cover letter to Dr Pluess (m.pluess@qmul.ac.uk) and Dr Jones (j.jones@qmul.ac.uk) outlining their suitability for the selected project at latest by December 20th 2014. Applicants should also include a statement of motivation and CV, which should include the contact details of at least two academic referees.
Kind regards,
Michael Pluess
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