Wall Street Journal
May 15, 2015
As a social psychologist, I have long been amused by economists and their curiously delusional notion of the “rational man.” Rational? Where do these folks live? Even 50 years ago, experimental studies were demonstrating that people stay with clearly wrong decisions rather than change them, throw good money after bad, justify failed predictions rather than admit they were wrong, and resist, distort or actively reject information that disputes their beliefs. In recent years, a new field has emerged—“behavioral economics”—to propose an alternative to the rational man of traditional economics. A spate of popular books and empirical studies have been published exploring human irrationality—in decision making, beliefs and actions. Researchers in this field are making up for lost time, or perhaps realizing that they are social psychologists after all.
As the offspring of traditional economics and experimental social psychology, behavioral economics shows remarkable hybrid vigor, and Richard Thaler, one of the new field’s founders, acknowledges its debt to psychological science throughout his highly enjoyable intellectual autobiography, “Misbehaving.” Indeed, his opening aphorism is Vilfredo Pareto’s 1906 claim that “the foundation of political economy and, in general, of every social science, is evidently psychology. A day may come when we shall be able to deduce the laws of social science from the principles of psychology.” That day is here, as Mr. Thaler explains.
For all of his creative career spanning 40 years, Mr. Thaler, who is a professor of behavioral science and economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, has been studying “the myriad ways in which people depart from the fictional creatures that populate economic models.” As human beings who arrogantly and often wrongly consider ourselves “sapiens,” we simply don’t match the model of human behavior favored by economists, one that “replaces homo sapiens” (whom Mr. Thaler calls Humans) with “a fictional creature called homo economicus” (whom he calls Econ). “Econs do not have passions; they are cold-blooded optimizers,” he says. “Compared to this fictional world of Econs, Humans do a lot of misbehaving”—thus the book’s title.
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