Hi y’all. I wanted to do a 🧵 summarizing our book that came out last month. (Thoughts, questions, more than welcome.) https://t.co/pLyx3Vlzlc

New episode and NEW HOST!! 😱🥳 Welcome @rachel_calcott to the team! She did a terrific job interviewing the inimitable @Moshe_Hoffman about altruism, empathy, love, irrationality, and, naturally, rap music! 🎶 https://t.co/bKfGiyHLNC

We are organising a great Winter School in Brisbane this year. It may be of interest to researchers in economics and beyond interested in the study of human behaviour.

Interested in evolutionary explanation for all sorts of behavioral econ findings? Lionel (nicely) compiles+summarizes many of the key models+insights+evidence, in his new book. 👇

Random q: If one team wins the World Cup due to penalty kicks, why do people treat them as if they are *the best*, in any objective sense, and not just like one of the two bests, who happens to have won a coin toss or is maybe a tiny drop better?

(The crux of all our work is that information & social incentives—w/ the help of game theory—can explain all sorts of quirky features of what we believe & like. But that thesis only makes sense if the effects of social incentives get “internalized”. Which studies like this show.)

(I personally find this interesting because it demonstrates one means of “internalization”—how our deeply held beliefs and values get learned. Such “internalization” is key to understanding all the subtle ways information and incentives can shape our beliefs and values.)

Really nice demonstration that when we learn from observing others we don’t just imitate them; we also change our values in a way that aligns with the observed behavior. (E.g., after observing A harm B, we place lower weight on B’s welfare, in our subsequent choices.)

Not sure what one can learn from this poll, but this question has been explored in many papers in the field. Short,non-exhaustive thread below for those who would like to know more.

(Of course, if the justifications were the actual source ot the decision, no reason power would play any role, and no reason they would grow more absurd as power grows.)

(Why? Presumably because they pay less of a cost if no one buys their justifications. And they are taking more extreme decisions, in need of justifying, because they now have the power to do so.)

One way to tell justifications are just post-hoc, and not what's actually driving the decision: As the decision maker gets more and more power to get away with doing what they want, their justifications become more and more absurd.

(Don't throw out the baby w/ the bath water. Keep the claims distinct. Conscious deliberative choice in novel settings≠learned or evolved tastes/beliefs/intuitions.) Eom

(There is ample evidence that game theory helps us understand all sorts of learned or evolved behaviors. And quirky aspects of our beliefs, tastes, intuitions etc, that are shaped by these processes.)

(But many behavioral scientists conflate this claim with the claim that game theory in general doesn't fit human behavior. But that ignores all the aspects of human behavior that have little to do with conscious deliberative decision making.)

(Imo the former is well worth demonstrating. It is important to understand what models do and don't fit our conscious, deliberative decision making processes. And I concur that classical game theory isn't the best fit, except perhaps under extreme conditions.)

Cool paper. Just tbc: There is a big difference btwn saying game theory doesn't do well when it comes to conscious strategic behavior in novel settings. And saying game theory doesn't do well when it comes to explaining our learned or evolved tastes, beliefs, and intuitions.

(Like is "people believe what they want to be true" more plausible than the dinosaur story? Biologists have ways to immediately assess plausibility of dinosaur story in o.p.. How would a psychologist be able to assess a priori plausibility of the motivated reasoning story?)

(What would a social scientist be able to say to weed something like this out? Are there *any* constraints to what passes as a reasonable hypothesis that could be used here? Evolution offers such a constrain in biology. What is it in, say, social-psychology?)

(Suggests to me how crucial it is for a field to have a solid theoretical foundation. To know which hypothesis are not even worth considering. Let alone getting distracted and confused by for decades.)

Notice that no biologist would treat this hypothesis as more than just a cure joke. How well would an analogous hypothesis do in the social sciences?