Thaler and his followers showed that people do not always behave as standard theory dictates. For example, contrary to the classical idea of ​​economically rational agents, a real person treats the same things differently. sums of money, received from various sources (salary, investment income, lottery winnings, etc.), and often distributes its expenses depending on the sources of income. Regular income is more often used to purchase necessities, while irregular income is more often used for entertainment and luxury goods. It follows that two people with exactly the same income but different sources will spend and save money differently—behavioral economics can predict how. Accordingly, economists (and other interested parties) can extract additional predictive knowledge from information about the structure of income, not just its size.

Thaler called this “mental accounting.” This theory shows that when distributing their personal budgets, people make decisions that are not at all rational: for example, they spend money according to credit card and at the same time maintain some reserve of savings, although it would be more logical for Homo economicus to use the set aside funds to pay off debt. At sales, people often buy things that they don’t use later, etc.

Push to the right decisions

A key feature of behavioral economics is its desire, based on its knowledge of people, to adjust policy decisions in various areas - from education and health care to public safety and financial products for the population. In 2008, Thaler co-authored Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness with Harvard Law School's Cass Sunstein, which became an economic bestseller. Thaler and his book so influenced then British Prime Minister David Cameron that in 2010 he created a task force designed to nudge people to make the best decisions for themselves and society.

Thaler and Sunstein called their concept of coercion (“nudging”) to make good choices a seemingly paradoxical term: “libertarian paternalism.” If policy makers want to get citizens to make the economic decision they want without limiting their freedom of choice, they need to be nudged in the right direction through the default option. For example, to stimulate pension savings, it is better to transfer workers to such a system automatically, and those who do not agree must refuse in an express way. If you give people an active choice between two options, they will most likely choose the “keep as is” option, not because it is better, but because people have a “cognitive bias” in favor of maintaining the status quo.

Thaler is a scientific consultant to the American non-profit organization ideas42, which aims to “apply behavioral insights to the toughest social problems.”

Richard Thaler became a regular candidate for the Nobel Prize in Economics just a few years ago. But when he began his scientific career, he was perceived by the academic community as an outsider and a fringe, recalls his colleague and co-author Cass Sunstein. When Thaler was given a position at the University of Chicago, Nobel laureate on economics in 1990, Merton Miller said: “Every generation must go through its own mistakes" And the famous American judge, lawyer and economist Richard Posner said to his face: “You are absolutely unscientific!”

In May 2016, already an established economist, Thaler stressed: “It is time to stop treating behavioral economics as a scientific revolution - it is simply a return to the open-minded, intuitive discipline that was invented by Adam Smith and complemented by powerful statistical tools and data sets.” .

Scientists who work at the intersection of psychology and economics are not given the Nobel Prize very often, notes Vladimir Spiridonov, head of the Laboratory of Cognitive Research at RANEPA. Before this, there were two cases when psychologists were awarded prizes in economics, he recalls. Herbert Simon received it in 1978 for his research on acceptance. economic decisions entrepreneurs - he was the first to describe a company not as a structure focused solely on maximizing profits, but as “an adaptive system of physical, personal and social components that are united by a network of relationships and the willingness of its members to cooperate and strive to achieve a common goal.” Another example of the Nobel Prize at the intersection of psychology and economics is the award to Daniel Kahneman in 2002, Spiridonov points out. Kahneman received the prize for integrating ideas from psychological research into economics, “especially with regard to human judgment and decision-making under conditions of uncertainty,” the Nobel committee explained. Kahneman concluded that human decisions “may systematically deviate from those predicted by standard economic theory.” At the same time, Vernon Smith received the award at the same time, “who stood on alternative positions” and insisted that the economy works only according to economic laws, Spiridonov notes.

In his theories, Thaler explains decision-making not at the macroeconomic level or at the level of large industries or enterprises, Spiridonov says. It concerns microeconomics right down to planning family budget. “For example, Thaler showed that mental accounting (accounting for planning your own money) is structured like a real one. There is a division into separate expense items that do not intersect, and if they do intersect, they lead to fatal errors. If one item is completely spent, a person does not easily transfer money from one item to another, but considers that it is “different” money,” Spiridonov points out.

What's wrong in Russia?

“Thaler, since the author is not very simple, as far as I know, [in Russia] was translated only once,” says Spiridonov. Among Russian experts interested in the topic of behavioral economics, either “absolute pop” or very complex economic models, which have little to do with psychology, he adds. “In this sense, Thaler, on the one hand, is a very serious author and in places even very systematized, and on the other hand, crystal clear and very understandable, intelligible when he tries to explain to non-economists this strange matter that lies between psychology and economics,” - Spiridonov argues. In 2017, Thaler’s book was published for the first time in Russian - “New Behavioral Economics. Why people break the rules of traditional economics and how to make money from it.”

In Russia, psychological and economic theories are popularized quite actively, says Alexey Belyanin, head of the Laboratory of Experimental and Behavioral Economics at the Higher School of Economics (HSE), and now it is very fashionable to invest in yourself. But “much less is being done” than it could be, he adds: Thaler’s theories are for those who want to improve their already good situation, and in Russia the standard of living is quite low, people are not ready to think about such things. Another reason for the lack of demand for behavioral theories, according to Belyanin, is the immaturity of society: citizens are still prone to irrational behavior (excessive spending instead of saving for retirement, for example).

In early October, Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters' scientific research and intellectual property) named possible Nobel Prize winners in all fields, including economics. This year's nominees were Colin Camerer and George Lowensteen (“for their pioneering research in behavioral economics and neuroeconomics”), Robert Hall (“for their analysis of labor productivity and research into recession and unemployment”), as well as Michael Jensen, Stuart Myers and Raghuram Rajan (“for his study of decision-making processes in corporate finance”).

The Nobel Prize in Economics, unlike the other five Nobel Prizes (medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace prize), was not created by Alfred Nobel himself in 1901. The prize has been awarded since 1969, its founder is the Bank of Sweden. 78 scientists became laureates of the prize. Most of the laureates are scientists from the United States (and most of them worked at the University of Chicago). Russian scientists have received the prize only once - in 1975, it was awarded to the Soviet economist Leonid Kantorovich “for his contribution to the theory of optimal resource allocation.” People from Russia included Simon Kuznets (1971 prize for "empirically based interpretation economic growth") and Vasily Leontiev (1973 prize "for the development of the input-output method and its application to important economic problems"). At the time of the award, both scientists lived and worked in the United States.

In 2016, the prize was awarded to researchers Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström (both working in the USA, at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively) with the wording “for their contribution to contract theory.”

At the end of September, the Internet begins to be full of strange headlines like “Purination speed and a T-rex chicken” or “Rat pants and an attempt to pretend to be a badger.”

The point is not at all in the seasonal exacerbation of the Bredovirus, but in the annual presentation of the Ig Nobel Prize. Despite the funny and even ridiculous names, the works that received this prize are not at all meaningless, as is commonly believed. Unofficial award criteria: The achievement may sound completely unscientific and absurd, but at the same time it gives food for thought. This is not the opposite of the Nobel Prize, but simply a prize from another space.

Perhaps you can be surprised by any work from the list of awardees, but I especially want to consider the winners in the field of Psychology. What fun research have scientists done about humans and human behavior?

To lie or not to lie?

We can start with this year's award. Although an award in each category is not necessarily awarded every year, 2016 was lucky. A group of scientists from Belgium took the prize in psychology for studying the influence of age on the ability to lie.

Now, if you forget about this study for a second, imagine how you would answer the question: “At what age are people best at lying?” At what point in life is fantasy most developed and there are so many reasons to embellish or distort reality? I think the majority will answer that this is adolescence with its tragedies, first adult problems and acquaintance with the serious consequences of one’s actions.

Scientists came to the same conclusion, although they were based not on their own experience, but on the results of a survey of 1,005 visitors to a science museum aged 6 to 77 years.

The scientists gave study participants three tasks.

The first test is the stop-signal task. You must press one of the two buttons corresponding to the image on the screen as quickly as possible; If a beep sounds, you do not need to press the button. This standard way measuring the time it takes the brain to suppress inappropriate motor responses.

The second test is the Sheffield test. In a limited amount of time, you need to answer simple yes/no questions (“Is the grass green?”, “Do pigs fly?”). The color on the screen with the task shows whether you need to answer truth or lie. This test shows mastery of the art of lying, because it is indeed very difficult to give a false answer to simple questions in a short time.

The third test is a simple question: “How many times have you lied in the last 24 hours?”

A comprehensive analysis of these three tasks confirmed that the ability to lie develops from childhood, peaks in adolescence, and then begins to decline.

A lark, an owl or an extremely unpleasant guy?

In 2014, the prize was awarded to scientists who cast a shadow on the reputation of “night owls” - people whose activity period occurs in the late hours of the day. Peter Jonason from the School of Social Sciences and Psychology (Western Sydney University, Australia) and Amy Jones and Minna Lyons (Liverpool Hope University, UK) examined the correspondence between Dark Triad traits and chronotype. What does it mean?

The well-known standard division into “night owls” and “larks” is a significantly simplified division according to chronotype. In practice, there are 5 types (you can find out yours by completing a questionnaire). The chronotype determines at which hours the greatest physical and intellectual activity is observed, at which hours it is easier to wake up, and at which times it is easier to fall asleep.

The dark triad is a concept from psychology. It denotes a complex of personality traits such as narcissism (narcissism), Machiavellianism (achieving personal gain through deception and lies) and psychopathy (antisocial behavior and callousness). The gloomy name corresponds to the thoughts of bearers of these traits.

The winners of the 2014 Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology showed that the traits of the Dark Triad are inherent in people with a predominantly evening and nocturnal lifestyle.

This is explained by the fact that under the cover of darkness it is easier to deceive and manipulate; due to fatigue, vigilance weakens; darkness promotes relaxation and loss of control. As the authors note, people with Dark Triad traits act like other predators, such as lions and scorpions.

So it’s worth taking a closer look at your night owl friends.

I'm drunk? Then I'm attractive!

Psychologists were pleased in 2013. Laurent Beget, Oulman Zerhoni, Baptiste Soubra, Medhi Ouraba (France) and Brad Bushman (USA, UK, Netherlands, Poland), published “Beauty is in the Eye of the Beer Holder: People Who Think They Are Drunk Also Think They Are Attractive "

Participants in the experiment were given both alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, with half of the participants believing that they were given only alcohol, and the other half, on the contrary, was convinced that they were drinking exclusively non-alcoholic drinks. After a wonderful evening of drinks, they were rated on their attractiveness, brightness, originality and ease, and their speech was recorded on camera. Then specially selected judges determined the described qualities from the recording. The results showed that participants who thought they drank alcohol gave themselves more positive ratings.

It turned out that the fact of confidence in drinking alcohol itself was important, and not the fact of its consumption.

If people believe they drink alcohol, they see themselves as more attractive, or at least less unattractive, but this is just an illusion. Increased self-esteem is associated with ingrained ideas about alcoholic behavior patterns imposed by advertising and films. Moreover, scientists believe that the mind can become “intoxicated” without a single drop of the potion. We have hidden expectations about alcohol, so our behavior changes according to them. But one should not deny that consumption really inhibits some psychological processes and suppresses hidden complexes.

And although after drinking alcohol, representatives of the opposite sex really look more beautiful in the eyes of the beholder than before intoxication, your opinion about your own attractiveness, unfortunately, remains only yours.

See everything

One of the most notable psychological experiments was carried out by Dan Simons and Chris Chabris. Anyone who, by an absurd chance, is unfamiliar with this experiment should watch the video and count how many passes the team in white made with the ball.

There is a chance that you answered the question correctly and you didn’t see anything unusual in this video at first glance. The amazing becomes obvious only on repeat. This phenomenon is called "inattentional blindness". While concentrating on one thing, a person may lose sight of something else, especially if it goes beyond the usual expectations.

It turns out that we have no idea how much we are missing.

The effect of inattentional blindness manifests itself everywhere in everyday life. It can cause accidents between motorists and motorcyclists because there are many more cars on the road than motorcycles, and drivers are less likely to expect to see them. They even made a special one in London video clip to bring this issue to your attention. This effect is also actively used by magicians who focus on only one hand, for example, in which a coin has disappeared. The second hand remains outside the audience’s attention and performs all the “magic”.

This visual and stunning experiment turned into a metaphor: it began to be used in all sorts of interpretations that were not related to vision in principle. With the help of an effective visual benefits draw attention to the problem of suicide, and Guy Kawasaki suggests looking at this experiment as an illustration of the games taking place in the market. The ball players are competitors, and the sudden gorilla in the middle of the screen is an unexpected winning solution that is missed due to the close gaze of the competitors.

He who knows does not speak, he who speaks does not know

In 2000, the Ig Nobel Prize was awarded to the now famous David Dunning of Cornell University and Justin Krueger of the University of Illinois. Their work argues that incompetent people do not recognize their own incompetence and, furthermore, do not recognize the competence of others.

Valeria Ilyinichna with a talking poster.

Firstly, people with a low level of knowledge make mistakes and draw incorrect conclusions, and secondly, they cannot realize that their decisions are wrong. It turns out that they live in their own ideal world, where there is no place for uncertainty and doubt.

A paradoxical situation arises: in order to realize their incompetence, they must remove this incompetence, that is, begin to develop and increase their level of knowledge and skills.

To confirm the hypothesis, scientists conducted a series of experiments and came to the conclusion that people with a low level of knowledge exaggerated their mental capabilities the most, while people with really high level intelligence significantly underestimated their abilities. After comparing their answers with those of others, competent people overestimated their skills in relation to known outcomes, which did not happen with low-skilled people.

We often observe this effect in comments and discussions, where the most categorical conclusions are given by not the most knowledgeable people. It’s just that their insufficient knowledge does not allow them to see the full breadth and depth of the problem.

So it is worth always having a critical look at yourself and others, because confidence does not equal competence.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman is one of the founders of psychological economic theory and, perhaps, the most famous researcher of how a person makes decisions and what errors, based on cognitive distortions, he makes in doing so. For his study of human behavior under conditions of uncertainty, Daniel Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 (this is the only time a psychologist has received the Nobel Prize in Economics). What did the psychologist manage to discover? Over many years of research that Kahneman conducted with his colleague Amos Tversky, scientists found out and experimentally proved that human actions are guided not only and not so much by the mind of people, but by their stupidity and irrationality .

And, you see, it’s hard to argue with this. Today we bring to your attention 3 lectures by Daniel Kahneman, in which he will once again go through the irrational human nature, talk about cognitive distortions that prevent us from making adequate decisions, and explain why we should not always trust expert assessments.

Daniel Kahneman: “The mystery of the experience-memory dichotomy”

Using examples ranging from our attitudes toward vacations to our experiences with colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and pioneer of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman demonstrates how differently our experiencing selves and our remembering selves perceive happiness. But why does this happen and what are the consequences of such a splitting of our “I”? Find the answers in this lecture.

Now everyone is talking about happiness. I once asked a man to count all the books with the word “happiness” in the title published in the last 5 years, and he gave up after the 40th, but of course there were even more. The rise in interest in happiness is enormous among researchers. There are many trainings on this topic. Everyone wants to make people happier. But despite such an abundance of literature, there are certain cognitive distortions that practically do not allow us to think correctly about happiness. And my talk today will mainly focus on these cognitive pitfalls. This applies both to ordinary people thinking about their happiness and to the same extent to scientists thinking about happiness, since it turns out that we are all equally confused. The first of these pitfalls is a reluctance to acknowledge how complex this concept is. It turns out that the word “happiness” is no longer such a useful word because we apply it to too many different things. I think there is one specific meaning that we should limit ourselves to, but in general it is something that we will have to forget about and develop a more comprehensive view of what well-being is. The second trap is the confusion between experience and memory: that is, between the state of happiness in life and the feeling of happiness about your life or the feeling that life suits you. These are two completely different concepts, but both of them are usually combined into one concept of happiness. And the third is the illusion of focus, and it is a sad fact that we cannot think about any circumstance that affects our well-being without distorting its significance. This is a real cognitive trap. And there is simply no way to get it all right.

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Translation: Audio Solutions company

Read material on the topic:

Daniel Kahneman: "The Study of Intuition" ( Explorations of the Mind Intuition)

Why does intuition sometimes work and sometimes not? For what reason do most expert forecasts not come true and can we even trust the intuition of experts? What cognitive illusions prevent you from making an adequate expert assessment? How does this relate to the specifics of our thinking? What is the difference between “intuitive” and “thinking” types of thinking? Why intuition may not work in all areas human activity? Daniel Kahneman talked about this and much more in his video lecture Explorations of the Mind Intuition.

*Translation starts at 4:25 minutes.

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Translation: p2ib.ru

Daniel Kahneman: "Reflections on the Science of Well-Being"

An expanded version of Daniel Kahneman's TED talk. A public lecture given by a psychologist at the Third International Conference on Cognitive Science is also devoted to the problem of two “I” - “remembering” and “present”. But here the psychologist considers this problem in the context of well-being psychology. Daniel Kahneman talks about modern research on well-being and the results that he and his colleagues have been able to obtain recently. In particular, he explains on what factors subjective well-being depends, how our “real self” affects us, what the concept of utility is, which influences decision-making, how much the assessment of life affects experienced happiness, how attention and pleasure are interconnected, what we experience from something, and how much do we exaggerate the meaning of what we think about? And, of course, the question of what significance studies of experienced happiness have for society does not go unnoticed.

For Daniel Kahneman, one of the most troubling moments in today's global economic crisis was Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, admitting to a congressional committee that he had placed too much faith in the self-correcting ability of free markets.

“He basically said that the foundations on which he built his work were flawed, and coming from Greenspan is deeply impressive,” says Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his pioneering work on inclusion. individual aspects psychological research into economic science.

But the more significant point for Kahneman was that Greenspan in his speech considered not only individuals, but also financial organizations. “This seemed to me to ignore not only psychology, but also economics. He seems to believe in the magical power of the market to bring about self-discipline and good results.”

Kahneman is careful to point out that, as a psychologist, he is an outsider in the field of economics. However, he contributed to the formation of the foundation for new area research called behavioral economics, which challenges standard rational choice economics and introduces more realistic assumptions about human judgment and decision making.

Standard economic models assume that people rationally strive to maximize their benefits and minimize their costs. And proponents of behavioral economics challenge some of the traditional tenets, showing that people often make decisions based on hunches, emotions, intuition, and rules of thumb rather than on cost-benefit analysis; that markets are infected with the disease of herd behavior and groupthink; that individual choices can often be influenced by the way proposed solutions are framed.

Overconfidence is the driving force of capitalism
The global economic crisis, which is rooted in the acceptance by individuals and financial institutions decisions to invest in subprime mortgages has brought behavioral economics and the question of how people make decisions into focus. “The people who took out subprime mortgages were completely misled,” Kahneman says in an interview. F& amp; D "in his home located on the picturesque hills of Berkeley overlooking San Francisco. “One of the main ideas of behavioral economics, borrowed from psychology, is the widespread prevalence of overconfidence. People do things they shouldn't do because they believe in their success." Kahneman calls this “illusory optimism.”

“Illusory optimism,” he says, is one of the driving forces of capitalism. Many people are not aware of the risks they are taking,” says Kahneman. This idea was also made in Nassim Taleb's book The Black Swan, which points out that people do not take into account sufficiently possible consequences rare but large-scale devastating events that make our assumptions about the future wrong.

He states: “Entrepreneurs are people who take risks and, in most cases, do not know it themselves. This happens in the case of mergers and acquisitions, but also at the level of small entrepreneurs. In the US, a third of small businesses fail within the first five years, but if you poll these people, each individually they think they have an 80 to 100 percent chance of success. They just don't know."

Two sides or more
Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv in 1934 and grew up in Paris and then Palestine as a child. He is not sure whether his vocation as a psychologist is due to his early exposure to interesting gossip or, on the contrary, his interest in gossip was evidence of an awakening vocation.

“Like many other Jews, I suppose, I grew up in a world made entirely of people and words, and most of the words were about people. Nature practically did not exist, and I never learned to recognize flowers or understand animals, he writes in his autobiography. But the people my mother liked to talk about with her friends and my father were amazingly complex. Some of them were better than others, but the best were far from perfect, and none were simply bad. Most of her stories were told with irony, and there were two sides to all of them, if not more.”

At a fairly early age, in Nazi-occupied Paris, he experienced an episode that left a lasting impression because of the many different meanings and conclusions that could be drawn about human nature. “It was probably late 1941 or early 1942. Jews were required to wear the Star of David and obey a curfew from 6 p.m. I went out to play with a Christian friend and stayed out late. I turned my brown sweater inside out to walk the few blocks home. I was walking along an empty street and saw a German soldier approaching. He was wearing a black uniform, which I was told to fear more than other colored uniforms, worn by SS special forces soldiers. I was getting closer to him, trying to walk quickly, and noticed that he was looking at me intently. He called me over, picked me up and hugged me. I was afraid that he would notice the star on my sweater. However, he spoke to me very emotionally in German. When he put me down again, he opened his wallet, showed me a photo of the boy and gave me some money. I went home more confident than ever that my mother was right: people are infinitely complex and interesting.”

In 1946, his family moved to Palestine, and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Kahneman received his first degree in psychology with a minor in mathematics. In 1954, he was drafted into the Israeli army and after a year of service as a platoon commander, he was assigned to evaluate soldiers in combat units and their leadership abilities. Kahneman then developed a completely new interview system for assigning recruits to suitable positions, and this system, with only minor modifications, is used to this day.

He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1961 and was a lecturer at Hebrew University from 1961 to 1978, spending his sabbaticals abroad, notably at Harvard and Cambridge. It was while working in Jerusalem that a collaboration began that would later lead to a Nobel Prize in a field Kahneman had not studied, economics.

New direction of research
Kahneman, currently professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, received the Nobel Prize in 2002 for work he did with fellow psychologist Amos Tversky. The collaboration between the two scientists lasted more than ten years, but Tversky died in 1996, and the prize is not awarded posthumously. “Amos and I were lucky enough together to have the goose that laid the golden eggs, a shared mind that was better than either of our individual minds,” Kahneman said of their work together.

In presenting the prize, the Nobel Committee noted that Kahneman incorporated insights from psychology into economics, thereby laying the foundation for a new direction of research. The prize was given to Kahneman jointly with Vernon Smith, who created the foundations for the separate field of experimental economics.

Kahneman's main discoveries relate to decision making in situations of uncertainty. He demonstrated how human decisions can systematically fail to conform to the predictions of standard economic theory. Together with Tversky, he formulated "prospect theory" as an alternative that better explained observed behavior. Kahneman also discovered that human judgments can be based on intuitive breakthroughs that systematically deviate from the basic principles of probability. “His work has inspired a new generation of researchers in economics and finance to enrich economic theory by drawing on insights from cognitive psychology about underlying human motivation,” the Nobel committee said in a statement.

Prospect theory helps explain experimental findings indicating that people often make different decisions in situations that are essentially identical but presented in different forms. The article by these two authors became the second most cited article published in a prestigious scientific economic journal Econometrica in the period 1979-2000 ( KahnemanandTversky , 1979). This research has influenced a variety of disciplines, including marketing, finance, and consumer choice theory.

Kahneman says that one should not look for special meaning in the name of the theory. “When we were ready to submit the work for publication, we deliberately chose a meaningless name for our theory, “prospect theory.” We assumed that if the theory ever became famous, an unusual name would be beneficial. It was probably a smart decision."

Kahneman and Tversky's joint research examined why people's response to losses is significantly stronger than their response to gains, and this led to the formulation of the concept of "loss aversion", which is one of the main areas of research in behavioral economics.

Two psychologists also found empirically that people assign less decision weight to outcomes that are only probable than to outcomes that are certain. This tendency leads to risk aversion in cases of choice with a virtually certain gain and to risk taking in cases of choice with a virtually certain loss. This can explain the behavior of a player who loses many times in a row and yet refuses to accept his obvious losses and continues to play in the hope of getting his money back.

“People are willing to make bets in hopes of regaining what they lost,” Kahneman said in a 2007 Berkeley radio interview. This made him worried that leaders of a state who had brought the country to the brink of defeat in a war were more likely to accept additional risks than to stop hostilities.

The authors also found that people exhibit inconsistent preferences when the same option is presented to them in different forms. This helps explain irrational economic behavior, such as people traveling to a distant store to take advantage of a discount on a cheap item but not doing the same to get a discount on an expensive item.

Creating a new discipline
How prospect theory found its application to economics seems almost an accident of publication. Kahneman and Tversky decided to publish an article in the journal Econometrica, not PsychologicalReview , as the former published their earlier work on decision making, which brought their research to the attention of economists.

Kahneman says his collaboration with longtime research partner and friend Richard Thaler, a professor of economics and behavioral science at the University of Chicago, contributed to the development of behavioral economics. “Although I do not deny my merit, I must say that, in my opinion, the work of integration was actually done mainly by Thaler and the group of young economists that quickly began to form around him, starting with Colin Camerer and George Lowenstein, to whom then Matthew Rabin, David Leibson, Terry Odean and Sendhil Malainathan joined.”

Kahneman says that he and Tversky came up with “quite a lot of the original ideas that went on to be incorporated into the theoretical developments of some economists, and prospect theory certainly gave some legitimacy to the reliance on psychology as a source of realistic assumptions about economic entities" Thaler, who was a regular contributor to the “Anomalies” column in the magazine JournalofEconomicPerspectives in the period from 1987 to 1990 and periodically wrote in this column and subsequently, he says that it is thanks to the joint work of Kahneman and Tversky that today we have a thriving field of behavioral economics. “Their work provided the conceptual framework that made our field possible.”

The impetus created by the crisis
The noise created by the Nobel Prize, combined with introspection on the part of those sobered by the global economic crisis economists have created a strong impetus for the spread of behavioral economics. So strong that it has begun to permeate today's White House through books such as The Nudge to Make Good Choices. Nudge ") (Thaler and Sunstein) and "Predictably Irrational" (" PredictablyIrrational ") by Duke University professor Dan Ariely.

Nudged to Make Better Choices explores how people make choices and how they can be nudged to do so. best choice for themselves on a range of issues, such as buying healthy food or deciding to allocate more money to savings. “It's very clear that now is a good time for behavioral economics,” Kahneman says with a smile.

Not everyone agrees that behavioral economics is the future, viewing it as a passing and annoying fad. “Of course, today everyone is obsessed with behavioral economics. The casual reader may get the impression that the rational homoeconomicus died a sad death, and economists went forward and recognized the true irrationality of humanity. Nothing could be further from the truth,” says David Levin of Washington University in St. Louis.

“Proponents of behavioral economics are right to point out the limitations of human cognition,” says Richard Posner of the University of Chicago Law School. But if they have the same cognitive limitations as consumers, should they be involved in developing consumer protection systems?”

“Perhaps the biggest challenge facing behavioral economics is to demonstrate its applicability in the real world,” write Steven Levitt and John List in a paper published in the journal Science (2008) In almost all cases, laboratory studies reveal strong empirical evidence in favor of behavioral abnormalities. However, there are many reasons to suspect that these laboratory results may not be general enough to be valid in real-world markets."

Place in the economy
Although behavioral economics is now an established discipline taught at leading universities, “it remains a discipline built on the shortcomings of standard economic theory,” says Wolfgang Pesendorfer, professor of economics at Princeton University.

However, its full integration into economics has proven difficult, although Wallstreet and investment analysts take into account the cognitive and emotional factors that affect the decision-making process of individuals, groups and organizations. “There are too many theories of behavior, and most of them have too narrow applications,” writes Drew Fudenberg of Harvard University in his article.

In the eyes of some, even prospect theory remains flawed due to the lack of a generally accepted model for how reference points are established. “The fundamental difference between psychologists and economists is that psychologists are interested in individual behavior, while economists are interested in explaining the results of interactions between groups of people,” says David Levin in a lecture given at the European University Institute entitled “Is Behavioral Economics Doomed?”

Growing trust
However, the turmoil caused by the collapse of the subprime mortgage market and the subsequent global crisis has led to increased confidence in the need for greater consideration of human factors in regulation and economic policy. Kahneman suggests whole line conclusions from the current crisis.

The need for greater protection for consumers and individual investors. “There has always been a question about the need and the extent to which people should be protected from their own choices,” he says. But I think it has become very, very difficult to say that people don’t need protection.”

Market failures have much broader implications. “Interestingly enough, it turns out that when uninformed individuals lose their money, it leads to the collapse of the global economy. Accordingly, the irrational actions of individuals have significantly broader consequences in the context of rationally malicious actors in financial system and extremely weak regulation and oversight.”

♦ Limited forecasting capabilities. "Extremely high variability on stock markets and in the financial system indicates the level of uncertainty in the system and limited forecasting capabilities.”

Greenspan appears to agree that there are shortcomings in the models used to predict and assess risk. In an article published in FinancialTimes Last March, Greenspan compared human nature to a missing puzzle piece that makes it impossible to explain why the spreading subprime mortgage crisis was not identified earlier by risk management or econometric forecasting models.

“These models completely fail to take into account what I believe has hitherto been only a marginal factor in business cycle and financial models, the natural human response that leads to abrupt alternations of euphoria and fear, repeated from generation to generation with little or no change. there were no signs of knowledge accumulation, Greenspan writes. Asset price bubbles are swelling and bursting today, just as they have since the beginning XVIII century when modern competitive markets emerged. Of course, we tend to call such a behavioral response irrational. However, for forecasting, what should be important is not whether a human reaction is rational or irrational, but only its observability and systematicity.” “In my opinion, this is an important missing “explanatory variable” in both risk management and macroeconometric models.”

Reflections on thinking
In addition to the Nobel Prize in Economics, Kahneman has received recognition as one of the leading scientists in the field of psychology. “Kahneman, his colleagues and his students changed our understanding of how people think,” said American Psychological Association President Sharon Stephens when Kahneman was awarded the field's highest honor in 2007 “for his distinguished lifetime contribution to psychology.” Kahneman continues to closely monitor the development of behavioral economics, but has long been involved in other issues. Today, the focus of his work has shifted to the study of well-being, and he is working with Gallup to conduct a worldwide survey to quantify global issues and opinions in more than 150 countries.

Challenge to the Clergy
In the past, Kahneman has compared the economics community to a clergy that is difficult for heretics to enter. But he admits how far economics has advanced over the past three decades in incorporating findings from psychological research and elements from other social sciences. “We published our article in the magazine Econometrica in 1979, that is, 30 years ago. In 2002 I was received with honors in Stockholm. So it's not a very strict church, given that during the early years economists largely ignored us. Yes, I was talking about the church, but this is not a church where you will be burned at the stake for heresy, otherwise we would be missing a lot of people!”

Linda problem
Linda is an energetic woman of 30-35 years old. She can knock back a glass of moonshine without blinking an eye and make a toast no worse than a native Georgian. She is also enraged by any manifestations of discrimination and is excited by demonstrations in defense of African rhinoceroses.

Question. Which option is more likely:

1. Linda is a bank teller;
2. Linda is a bank teller and a feminist?

Decide for yourself which answer you choose and move on to the next problem.

Aircraft carrier problem
A large aircraft carrier with 600 sailors on board is sinking in the cold ocean. You have received an SOS signal, but you can only go to rescue them on one of two ships:

1. fast cruiser, accommodating 200 sailors. You are guaranteed to make it, but you will only save 200 people.
2. a slow battleship that can accommodate everyone, but there is a 50% chance that by the time the battleship arrives, the entire crew of the carrier will drown.

What ship will you sail on to save the sailors?

I hope you have already chosen the answers for the problems. In 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics received a psychologist for the first time. His name was Daniel Kahneman(Daniel Kahneman). Something similar happened only 2 times before - in 1974 and 1994. Then the Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to mathematicians. What revolutionary could Kahneman offer?

Daniel Kahneman, born in Israel, lives in the USA.

Kahneman concluded that human actions(and therefore economics and history) It is not so much reason that guides as human stupidity and that most people's actions are irrational. The fact that people are arrogant and stupid has been known at all times, but Kahneman experimentally proved that the illogicality of people’s behavior is natural, and showed that its scale is too great. The Nobel Committee recognized that this psychological law is directly reflected in economics.

Economists agreed that the highest award in economics was awarded to the psychologist quite rightly, having found the courage to admit that for several centuries they had been brainwashing each other and all of humanity, because they had somewhat simplified and idealized our lives, believing that people act in their commodity-money relations reasonable and balanced.

What witty experiments carried out by Kahneman? They are described in the books “Psychology of Forecasting” (1973), “Decision Making under Uncertainty” (1974), “Prospect Theory: Analysis of Decision Making under Risk” (1979), “Decision Making and the Psychology of Choice” (1981).

Let's return to our problems, which were proposed to American students of the Faculty of Mathematics. In the problem about Linda there are more 70% of students chose option 2, because Linda's preliminary description matched their ideas about feminists, although it was irrelevant and distracting. Correct answer- 1st. Mathematics students studying probability theory knew that the probability of a simple event occurring (Linda being a cashier) is higher than the probability of a compound event occurring (Linda being a cashier and Linda being a feminist). In other words, the total number of cashiers is greater than the number of feminist cashiers. They knew, but they took the bait.

Conclusion: human stereotypes easily overshadow sober reason.

The aircraft carrier problem is even more interesting. 72% of students We chose the option with a fast cruiser. When asked why they chose it, the students answered that if you sail on a cruiser, then 200 people are guaranteed to survive, and in the case of a slow battleship, perhaps everyone will die - I can’t risk all the sailors!

Another group of students formulated the problem question differently. "You have two options for saving the above-mentioned sailors. If you choose a cruiser, then exactly 400 of them will die, and if a battleship, then again 50 to 50 (all or no one)." With this formulation 78% of students They already chose a slow battleship. When asked why they did this, the answer was usually given: in the version with a cruiser, most of the people die, while the battleship has a good chance of saving everyone.

As you can see, the condition of the problem has not essentially changed, it’s just that in the first case the emphasis was placed on 200 surviving sailors, and in the second - on 400 dead, which is the same thing.

What is it like correct solution? In the case of an armadillo, the probability of salvation of 0.5 needs to be multiplied by 600 sailors, we get that an armadillo can save on average 300 people. A fast cruiser will save only 200. 300 > 200 , therefore, if you put emotions aside, you need to save an aircraft carrier on a battleship, so in this case, according to the theory of probability, more people can be saved.

Conclusions:
1) although people know a lot, but little ability to use knowledge in practice. Let me remind you that the problems were given to students who were well acquainted with the theory of probability.
2) people are more impressed by losses than achievements.

Here's another Kahneman observation.

A visitor entering a cafe is greeted by a waitress: " Oh, finally, we have our 1000th visitor! You get a prize - cup with blue rim "The visitor accepts the unexpected gift with a tight smile, thinking where to put the gift. A few minutes later the waitress runs up to the visitor again and apologizes, saying, an error occurred, and you are our 999th, and the 1000th is that disabled person with a cane who came in, after which he grabs the cup and runs away screaming: who do I see etc. Our visitor begins to worry: uh!, uh!!, EEE!!! Where are you going?! What an infection!- his irritation grows to the level of rage, even though he needs the cup no more than an oar in the Sahara Desert.

Conclusion: the degree of satisfaction from the acquisition is less than the degree of grief from adequate losses. People are ready to fight for their pennies and are less inclined to bend over for a ruble. (I am ready to subscribe to every word.)

Instead of an afterword.

When making decisions people's choices are not always dictated by sober reason, and often by instincts, emotions or what is commonly called intuition (conclusions on insufficient grounds). As a rule, when people in life make intuitive decisions on insufficient grounds, then if they guess right, they remember them and take credit for them, and if they are wrong, they blame the circumstances and forget. And then they say: I always rely on intuition, and it never lets me down!

Although people can theoretically integrate and operate with cotangents on paper, in practice in life they tend to only add and subtract and usually do not go beyond multiplication and division.

Former excellent students at school often - losers in life. Professors and academicians know Bohr's postulates, Mendel's laws and the theory of quantum fields, but in fact they can be bankrupt in simple enterprises, complete ignoramuses in the elementary psychology of communication and unhappy in marriage.

The irrationality of people is such that they are more willing to believe that they know the answers to any unknowable questions and refuse to admit the obviousness that in fact they cannot see beyond their own nose.

Eh, it’s not for nothing that Kahneman was given the Nobel Prize. Reading how on January 2-3, Minsk residents swept away several refrigerators from store shelves and fought for the last microwave oven, I was once again convinced that reason is the last thing that moves people. When was the first shock from devaluation Belarusian ruble passed, people flocked to the shops, unsuccessfully trying to return household appliances, although in fact during the crisis it was necessary to buy up cereals, flour, salt, matches, kerosene. The real crisis in Belarus has not even begun...

(The article was prepared based on materials from the site www.orator.ru).