Opinion | How Behavioral Economics Took Over America - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...human-behavior-nudge.html
behavioral economics nudge priming science research psychology ideology
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Some behavioral interventions do seem to lead to positive changes, such as automatically enrolling children in school free lunch programs or simplifying mortgage information for aspiring homeowners. (Whether one might call such interventions “nudges,” however, is debatable.)
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it’s not clear we need to appeal to psychology studies to make some common-sense changes, especially since the scientific rigor of these studies is shaky at best.
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Nudges are related to a larger area of research on “priming,” which tests how behavior changes in response to what we think about or even see without noticing
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Behavioral economics is at the center of the so-called replication crisis, a euphemism for the uncomfortable fact that the results of a significant percentage of social science experiments can’t be reproduced in subsequent trials
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this key result was not replicated in similar experiments, undermining confidence in a whole area of study. It’s obvious that we do associate old age and slower walking, and we probably do slow down sometimes when thinking about older people. It’s just not clear that that’s a law of the mind.
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And these attempts to “correct” human behavior are based on tenuous science. The replication crisis doesn’t have a simple solution
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Journals have instituted reforms like having scientists preregister their hypotheses to avoid the possibility of results being manipulated during the research. But that doesn’t change how many uncertain results are already out there, with a knock-on effect that ripples through huge segments of quantitative social scienc
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The Johns Hopkins science historian Ruth Leys, author of a forthcoming book on priming research, points out that cognitive science is especially prone to building future studies off disputed results. Despite the replication crisis, these fields are a “train on wheels, the track is laid and almost nothing stops them,” Dr. Leys said.
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These cases result from lax standards around data collection, which will hopefully be corrected. But they also result from strong financial incentives: the possibility of salaries, book deals and speaking and consulting fees that range into the millions. Researchers can get those prizes only if they can show “significant” findings.
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It is no coincidence that behavioral economics, from Dr. Kahneman to today, tends to be pro-business. Science should be not just reproducible, but also free of obvious ideology.
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Technology and modern data science have only further entrenched behavioral economics. Its findings have greatly influenced algorithm design.
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The collection of personal data about our movements, purchases and preferences inform interventions in our behavior from the grocery store to who is arrested by the police.
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Setting people up for safety and success and providing good default options isn’t bad in itself, but there are more sinister uses as well. After all, not everyone who wants to exploit your cognitive biases has your best interests at heart.
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Despite all its flaws, behavioral economics continues to drive public policy, market research and the design of digital interfaces.
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One might think that a kind of moratorium on applying such dubious science would be in order — except that enacting one would be practically impossible. These ideas are so embedded in our institutions and everyday life that a full-scale audit of the behavioral sciences would require bringing much of our society to a standstill.
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There is no peer review for algorithms that determine entry to a stadium or access to credit. To perform even the most banal, everyday actions, you have to put implicit trust in unverified scientific results.
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We can’t afford to defer questions about human nature, and the social and political policies that come from them, to commercialized “research” that is scientifically questionable and driven by ideology. Behavioral economics claims that humans aren’t rational.
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That’s a philosophical claim, not a scientific one, and it should be fought out in a rigorous marketplace of ideas. Instead of unearthing real, valuable knowledge of human nature, behavioral economics gives us “one weird trick” to lose weight or quit smoking.
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Humans may not be perfectly rational, but we can do better than the predictably irrational consequences that behavioral economics has left us with today.