I've noticed a trend recently: economists are claiming to be experts on human behavior, a realm once restricted mainly to psychologists.
A recent article in the L.A. Times, titled, "UCLA researchers study social forces shaping human behavior during war" finally pushed me to write this.
When I saw this title, I naturally thought the "researchers" would be psychologists or even sociologists. But economists?
What do economists know about human behavior (He asked rhetorically)? Is there really an economist out there anywhere whose predictions about the economy or the economic behavior of human beings are better than chance? And what kind of"research" do these economists do? I can tell you that it's not experimental. In fact, it's based on complex statistical analyses from a variety of different sources that are used to predict the behavior of individuals during war. I'm not suggesting that their "research" doesn't have value, but if we want to understand the behavior of individuals, I submit that we have to study the behavior of individuals in controlled settings.
Christ, economists even get a Nobel prize! For what? Has any economic theory ever accurately predicted or explained human behavior? That is why economists, like social workers, have to go shopping for a discipline with a real research base that they can use to buttress their own theories.
And that discipline is usually psychology. Until recently, that is.
Economists, not having a substantial discipline of their own, have become polygamists, extending their marriage with psychology to include, you guessed it, neuroscience.
The union of these three disciplines is a new discipline called neuroeconomics. According to the website of The Center for the Study of Neuroeconomics at George Mason University, neuroeconomics is "dedicated to the experimental study of how emergent mental computations in the brain interact with the emergent computations of institutions to produce legal, political, and economic order."
What the hell does that mean? How does one study mental computations experimentally? (Are there really computations going on in the brain?) And, is there really a "legal, political and economic order"?
But the issue is much larger than whether economists know anything about human behavior.
The issue is who is in the best position to explain human behavior and by what methods? Nowadays, everyone, it seems, is an expert on human behavior, especially those who aren't experts (e.g., economists, people with MBAs, people with literature degrees, social workers, therapists, and journalists). If you have a Ph.D. in experimental or behavioral psychology beware; everyone knows as much as you do about your subject matter. While no one would ever question a physicist's explanation of, well, physical things, there are many out there who will debate with you your knowledge of and expertise on human behavior.
So, be prepared for more psychologizing from economists and others from business schools at universities, especially when they collaborate with brain imaging researchers.
Let me wrap up by saying emphatically that no amount of knowledge or understanding of the brain mechanisms involved when we are said to make decisions or choices will ultimately explain the decision-making or choice behaviors. That will come only from an understanding of the environmental contingencies that impact directly on the behaviors of interest and that will only come from experimental behavioral psychologists.
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Neuroeconomics is bunk that does a disservice to legitimate forms of both neuroscience and economics. But a growing number of economists do conduct experiments, and often their topics and questions are much more clever, interesting, and relevant than those being examined by psychologists, who are often mired in old ways of thinking.
ReplyDeletePS No one can predict the stock market or the larger economy. Forget it.
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ReplyDeleteBut of course 'mainstream' psychologists have set this up by elevating neurologizing above data; 'behavioral' economists (not to be confused with behavioral economists such as Steve Hursh) have simply continued this progression.
ReplyDeleteIf real psychologists (people with doctorates in psychology) can do this, why not everyone?
And a minor disagreement: it is quite possible that future knowledge of brain mechanisms will account for phenomena like discounting functions -- we're just nowhere near that yet.