Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Entscheidungspsychologie


Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Blog

Archive for July, 2018

the infidel and the professor

The Infidel and the Professor by Dennis Rasmussen is a biography of the friendship between David Hume (1711-1776) and Adam Smith (1723-1790), two prominent figures of the Scottish Enlightenment.

The infidel in the title referes to Hume because of his staunch skepticism (atheism), perhaps best illustrated by his attempt to explain how central psychological needs (the need for identifying causes or the need to assuage fear and anxiety in the face of mortality) can lead humans to ascribe God a central role in human affairs. In turn, Smith was a well-respected professor of moral philosophy, being responsible for teaching advanced students about religion and ethics (along with political economy). A friendship between such two apparently opposing figures seems unlikely but Rasmussen uses the surviving correspondence between the two and analysis of their work to provide not only a picture of their intellectual influence on each other but also a fascinating account of their friendship. For example, Rasmussen argues convincingly that many of Smith’s points in his The Wealth of Nations were influenced or preambled by Hume. 

The final chapters covering Hume’s death are most touching and the book also contains Hume’s short autobiography as an appendix. Hume completed the short piece “My Own Life” a few months before dying of colon cancer, and he wanted to have it published as a preface to all future editions of his works. Both Hume and Smith seem to have wanted to have Hume’s last days accurately described and ensure people knew the “infidel” was able to keep his good spirits without need for spirituality. As a consequence, Smith volunteered to give an account of his friend’s final days in a letter to Hume’s editor that typically accompanies Hume’s autobiograhy. 

I really enjoyed the book and was surprised to learn about Hume and Smith’s deep interest in psychological accounts of human behaviour and its consequences for history and economics. Perhaps one can even see Hume and Smith’s friendship as the embodiment of a common birthplace of psychology and economics.

silly season

The summer is the so-called “silly season” – the time when media (and the public?) descend into the mental equivalent of a slumber.

It is therefore not so surprising that the talk of the town where I’m vacationing – Portugal – is less concerned with the fallout of Brexit and the shifting balance of powers and alliances between the USA, Europe, and China or Russia, and much more about whether Madonna’s moving to Portugal and her social media presence has important benefits for Portuguese tourism. 

For those of you less familiar with Madonna’s life, she moved to Lisbon, Portugal, in May 2017 (since a much heralded boon for Portuguese tourism) and was able to extract some (but less popular) benefits from Lisbon’s local government, including a welcoming reception by Lisbon’s Mayor and deal for a number of parking spots in the old town for her fleet of 15 automobiles. 

One popular Portuguese satirical commentary show, Governo Sombra (Shadow Government), has called for scientific studies showing the economic benefits of Madonna’s move to Portugal. 

I have taken up this challenge by analysing the official statistics on the number of overnight stays that are made available by the Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE; Statistics Portugal). Specifically, I used the time series data between January 2006 and April 2017 to forecast the results for the post-Madonna period of May 2017 to April 2018 (unfortunately INE doesn’t yet provide more recent data). My rationale for this analysis is that an increase of overnight stays after Madonna’s arrival that goes beyond the forecast based on the pre-Madonna period would represent supporting evidence for Madonna’s positive effect on Portuguese tourism. Alas, I am able to report that the data do not reveal a Madonna effect. As one can see in the figure below the actual number of overnight stays falls well within the predicted confidence intervals from the simple forecast model. 

Of course, there are a number of problems with this type of analysis as has been pointed out by Campbell and Ross (1968). Perhaps a good summer reading as a break from the silliness of the season. 

Campbell, D. T., Ross, H. L. (1968). The Connecticut crackdown on speeding: Time-series data in quasi-experimental analysis. Law and Society Review, 3(1), 33. http://doi.org/10.2307/3052794

Toward more methodological diversity in evolutionary psychology

Andreas Wilke and Peter Todd have organised a special issue of Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences that includes a number of contributions showcasing examples of methodological diversity in the field, including the use of agent-based simulations, field work with non-human animals, and laboratory studies, to name but a few.

Bettina von Helversen, Andreas Wilke, Greg Samanez-Larkin, and I contributed a piece on the lack of convergent validity between measures of foraging (i.e., search for resources) using laboratory tasks. This work highlights how latent variable (structural equation) modeling can help understand commonalities and differences across paradigms that have been used in the behavioural sciences to understand the cognitive processes and individual differences underlying foraging behavior.

Foraging, exploration, or search? On the (lack of) convergent validity between three behavioral paradigms

Recently it has been suggested that individual humans and other animals possess different levels of a general tendency to explore or exploit that may influence behavior in different contexts. In the present work, we investigated whether individual differences in this general tendency to explore (exploit) can be captured across three behavioral paradigms that involve exploration–exploitation trade-offs: A foraging task involving sequential search for fish in several ponds, a multiarmed bandit task involving repeatedly choosing from a set of options, and a sequential choice task involving choosing a candidate from a pool of applicants. Two hundred and sixty-one participants completed two versions of each of the three tasks. Structural equation modeling revealed that there was no single, general factor underlying exploration behavior in all tasks, even though individual differences in exploration were stable across the two versions of the same task. The results suggest that task-specific factors influence individual levels of exploration. This finding causes difficulties in the enterprise of measuring general exploration tendencies using single behavioral paradigms and suggests that more work is needed to understand how general exploration tendencies and task-specific characteristics translate into exploratory behavior in different contexts.

von Helversen, B., Mata, R., Samanez-Larkin, G. R., & Wilke, A. (2018). Foraging, exploration, or search? On the (lack of) convergent validity between three behavioral paradigms. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 12(3), 152-162.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000121