Saying a lot, but in a nice package. Very cool. Well, I know it's evening, so I also want to be mindful of your time. I'm pretty happy to have a freewheeling kind of let's explore some stuff with the series. But I also, I mean, if you tell me, like, I've got 20 minutes to give you, then that's what we'll do. Um, you should tell me what you would like to optimize. I mean, I'd

love to hear, I'd love to hear what you work on. So whatever works for you. Yeah.

So I'll give you a little background on me and a little background on what we're working on in the bigger picture and then what I'm hoping to get from you. We can see where that takes us. So my background, so you know, my Ball State affiliation. Beyond that, I'm a social psych guy. I study persuasion and attitude change and attitude strength and that world. And so I started producing this podcast called Opinion Science a couple of years ago now. And the whole premise is how do we understand people's opinions, where they come from and how they change, right? And so I'm interested in talking to psychologists, communication folks, political scientists, and even folks like film critics and political campaign managers, polling folks. So that's kind of where I come at this from. And so there's another show out there called Behavioral Grooves, who they're very much in the business of behavioral science. I was on one

of their, yeah, I was on one of their, uh, okay. Well, no, wait, was I on one of their, I don't know that you have been. Wait, maybe I haven't been on there, but somebody, anyway, I had some connectivity. Maybe it's someone I knew was on there and asking questions. I, or at least I've heard them.

Yeah. So, so they're out there. They're very behavioral-y targeting, like applied insights. Yeah. And so, you know, we kind of live in similar worlds, but not the same one. And we had connected a little bit. I had produced this kind of narrative episode on cognitive dissonance, which was like, let's kind of break down the story, talk to the characters, and sort of clarify, like, what is this construct that people think they know? I remember what

it is. I have this app that

I helped co-found, and the CEO of it was on Behavioral Boot. Gotcha. Okay. So anyhow, so they heard this episode that I produced, and they kind of – they had – one of those guys knows George Lownstein. And just casually, Lownstein mentioned this anecdote about where the word behavioral economics came from. And like the room that it was, that idea was hatched in. And he thought, oh, well, we should do like the story of behavioral economics. And where did it come from? What does it mean? And so we've kind of sketched out this kind of five part series. Looking at like, you know, early days of Thaler pushing back on assumptions Kahneman and Tversky raising hell uh economists and psychologists getting mad and then now this point where it's hit sort of a mainstream semi-accepted state that it just sort of floats on on its own. So where we're at now is you are probably the last person that we'll talk to for this, which is handy because we kind of know where we have some missing pieces. So there are kind of three basic, three general things that I think you could speak to. One is I had seen in Thaler's book that he calls you out as in the first cohort of the summer camp for behavioral economics. And that strikes me as an important part of the story. Like when, okay, now this is a machine that's chugging along and people are hopping on board. And so where is this going? So I want to kind of get your experience as like a very young, bright-eyed student. then also just kind of get you to muse on what behavioral economics is, what the parameters are that make something behavioral economics or not, et cetera. And then finally, if you'll indulge me, I didn't real, I didn't connect the dots until I was prepping to talk with you that you are on that paper from 20 years ago or so the audit study on oh yeah job discrimination and i teach that constantly uh i never put two and two together that that that was you so i don't know that it'll end up in this series but there is sort of yeah yeah talk about it and and and share that and it may sort of be its own little spinoff conversation um because it strikes me that that was a Herculean effort to actually pull off. Yeah,

yeah. So

I think there's a story there too. So does that all sound good? Sounds great to me, yeah. So if we kind of jump right in, my impression is that you connected with Thaler as an undergrad. Is that right? So what was that? Where did your paths cross?

Yeah. So I was an undergrad at Cornell when Thaler was there. And I had taken some econ classes. I think the first thing that really woke me up to like, wow. I mean, I was a math undergrad. I did a lot of math. In fact, the first econ class i took was just a phd micro class and i was like oh this is like math and i was like also what a part of me was like i guess it's just math i don't know like so i just do like math and so i seemed fine but then i took this i was like it's got to be more to it than that so i took this very very interesting class by Bob Frank it was very eye opening and it to this day remains one of the best sort of taught classes that I've ever been to he had this exercise which was just immensely valuable where he would just say well the premise of the exercise is great which is look if you're a botanist a walk in the woods is a very different experience because you just see the world differently. If you're an economist slash social scientist slash psychologist, a walk in the world should be very different. Because after all, everything is flowers and leaves for you. And so his class was, how do I inculcate people, that sort of muscle, to look at the world through these new eyes that i'm providing rather than simply look at research papers through these new eyes i'm providing and when you do that it helps you understand the thing you're learning but in turn it helps you question the thing you're learning so he had this really quite terrific way to do that i think just super powerful and i'd love to see more people use it as a tool so his way was try to every week or two weeks you would write an anomalies thing you would try to find something in the world that appears to not fit what you're currently learning, or at least has some tension. And then you can resolve the tension. It may not really be an anomaly. So actually, the reason this is happening is, and then you understand the idea at a deeper level, because you realize the superficial application is failing, but actually a deeper. And now you've effectively created a conversation with tension between reality and the idea, and you were forced to resolve that tension. That's two pages. Now, Bob Frank listening to this might be thinking that has nothing to do with what I actually assigned, but this is what I remember. Oh, let's just assume this is what happened and not question what I'm saying. So that is an incredibly valuable exercise. It just was so interesting. He also taught in class some of the basic JDM stuff, heuristics biases. But that, being taught that, but being forced to do this was just so fun. And I think it really woke me up to the realization that if I'm going to do social science, and that wasn't clear to me that I was going to do economics or psychology, it wasn't clear to me I was going to do any of that. If I'm going to, I needed to do this. Because if I'm just doing math, I'm just going to do math. Or at that time, I was doing computer science theory. And I'm like, let's do CS theory or logic or math. But I'm going to do social science. This is what I'm going to going to do because this seemed interesting because this is reality having a conversation with our preconceptions. So that was exciting. And then Thaler was teaching a PhD class and I thought, oh, I'll try taking that. And I think it's fair to say that that is the class which had the most favorable teacher-to ratio I've ever seen in my life. I think there were three of us in that class, students. And there were three faculty, which you might think is one-to But, I mean, you can imagine, it's a pretty heavy teaching load for them. So they had a bunch of guest lecturers on top of it. So this class was basically like, I mean, it was absurd. And it was just insane that they have three faculty, three students and guest lecturers. Anyway, it was really interesting. And I think I'm not sure what I remember of the class other than the faculty were just, I learned like most of, I think what you learn when you're young is you get imprinted that this is a way to be a scholar so like Kathleen Valley I still remember her and how she thought and Bob Gibbons and and Dick Thaler Richard Thaler I just I just you know and so they really made a big impression on me and I stayed very close touch with with Thaler and to a degree Gibbons but like definitely Thaler because I became more interested in behavioral economics and it had a big influence on me that you know I was like this I actually applied to a PhD in computer science and I deferred it for a year and I said I'll try economics out and really what convinced me was that I was like I think I would enjoy doing economics if I could do something like this stuff like there wasn't really anyone doing it that I knew of. Matt Rabin came, so that was a little bit of a role model. But outside of that, there was like, you know, and David Lakeson was still a grad student. So there was a few, couple of people, but it really, you know, wasn't anything. And then that, so that was point one. Point two, which you might find interesting is, Baylor was very vehement that I not deal with behavioral economics in my PhD. He said it's really important that you are considered an actual economist with an actual field. I think I listened to him until the very end where I just stopped listening to him. And my job market paper was really a psychology paper. It was about human memory. But I did listen to him until then, and that proved to be very good advice. Maybe I should have listened all the way through, but I did go on the market as a bear. Maybe that was a mistake. I'm not sure. But his advice was great. So why

is that good advice? What was it about that that was helpful? Yeah.

If you said to me, who understands the rational model best in the economic profession? List 10 people. I'd put Taylor in that top 10. It goes back to the Bob Frank story. You can't understand the flaws of something if you don't know what the thing is really well. I think that's part of why it was very good advice. The other part of why it was very good advice is because behavioral, as a field, it doesn't have enough to equip you with tools at that time. So you need to get tools. And so like you do labor, you get tools of how to work with data. So you need, like there's an element in grad school where you're really acquiring is tools and ways of thinking. And so in that sense, he was right. And the third sense he was right is that it was much easier for me to be a behavioral economist on the market when I knew I could talk to anyone who did empirical work. And they'd be like, oh, he actually knows what he's doing. Talk to anyone who's doing theory. They're like, oh, he knows what he's doing. Somehow it's like China goes to Nixon. Like it's just easier. Nixon goes to China. It's just like easier. I think those are the three reasons he said it. It's related to something. Maybe it's one of your later questions, but might as well jump ahead now. Is that I really question why there's a field called behavioral economics. Like I know Thaler does. I think he still does. It doesn't actually make sense. Like shouldn't all economics be behavioral economics? And so what is this? Like if a student came to me now and said I want to be behavioral economics, I'm like, yeah, everybody, that's what you are. You're doing economics. So what do you want to work on? Like, what does that mean? So I do worry that the existence of a field and the continued existence of a field called behavioral economics is a form of failure perpetuating, which we shouldn't perpetuate. Do

you think it had to be identified as a domain at the beginning at least?

I think there's a period. Just get back to your summer school thing. One thing that's amazing about the summer school is that groups need identities to feel like you get there, you're like, I'm not doing this. I don't know what I'm doing. And you show up like a lot of people are interested in this now or like 30 people. And it's like 30 is a lot. Like when you think there's only two people, there's like a multiple, a them say well i'm not i wouldn't say i'm doing bigger economics so a bunch you know let's say half of them fell out but the other half they are like the leaders in this field so it's like at that moment like we're all the people who went on to be leaders but at the time there was no field there was nothing and so you're definitely right that having some notion of kindred spirits makes a big difference. And an identity label definitely helps you. But at some level, you kind of need things where there's programmed cell death. And the identity label needs to have programmed cell death. Because, you know, at some point, the identity label becomes exclusionary. And we want everybody to think they're a behavioral economist. We want economics to be behavioral economics. So, you know, at some point, it has to disappear, I think.

Yeah, that is a dilemma where, you know, you needed to rally the troops, but then it ends up back. So how could you plan for like, okay, in 20 years, let's assume we've infiltrated the group. We've spread our ideas and now we can abandon the name and we can just integrate back into

this group. That's exactly right. And I think the integration phase is partly what we're in because, and that's the challenge that we're facing. Because there's a lot of behavioral economics papers now that are being published. of them by people who don't call themselves behavioral economics economists and they're published and not even thought of as behavioral economics papers which is success so why are we still producing these we just so it's like it's a tough question that we have to now ask a little bit so i'm not even sure if you ask most people whether they would say I'm a behavioral economist. Now, I don't know. Because I don't, I mean, most of what I do integrate psychology, but why shouldn't, I mean, shouldn't all work? I mean, it doesn't make any sense. So I think that there's an element of, you're right, it's unclear how to do it.

I know that there's some frustration sometimes among psychologists who say, oh, we came across this economics paper from this year that discovered something that we published 20 years ago. And, you know, in some ways, that's a credit to this perspective has now kind of like gotten soaked up into the field of economics. But it also seems like it could be coming at the expense of

giving credit to other fields from which those ideas are coming. Absolutely. Absolutely. Without question. I think economists, even some behavioral economists are shockingly under read about psychology and they should be ashamed. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. And I think it's because if I were to, if they were to justify, I'm not saying all are, many are well-read, many, I mean, like George Zolensky, is he a behavioral economist or he's a psychologist? There is quite a few, and you see it especially in PhD students. And I think it comes from the following arrogance, really, which is that, well, I mean, psychologists ran their experiments, but it's without incentives. And they didn't really think about the exact mechanism. And it's like, no, they thought about mechanism in the constructs they use. You have a different construct. That's fine. You might want to rerun it. But I mean, personally, the situation was discovered a ton of rediscovery is just, it is absurd. If I were psychology, I would be like, this is absurd, like super absurd.

So yeah. So one of the places I wanted to go was like, what is the relationship between behavioral economics and economics and psychology so if we stick on psychology like if you were to reflect a little bit on i mean you kind of already have but like what is the role of psychology in the development of behavioral economics going

forward you mean where

we came from and where we're

where we came from yeah I mean where we came from I think the role of psychology is pretty clear which is um and it really goes back to the playbook of Kahneman Tversky which is like there was a moment in history where psychology and and you call it economics it's basically axiomatic choice theory intersected that intersection allowed a very fruitful place for psychologists to say, your axioms are goofy, I will now show you. It gave a very clear baseline model and the act of rejecting that model proved very generative. So if you look at a lot of papers in that period, they are actually playing off of the existence of this baseline model, if that makes sense. So like, you ever see these people in space, like astronauts or like whatever, whatever, if they want to go in this direction, they need something to push off of. The lack of gravity makes very transparent Newton's second law. You move through Newton's second law. The push is what lets you move. And with gravity, you don't notice it because walking is always a push, generates momentum situation. I'm saying that because research is very often like this. People don't appreciate how something generative occurs because you have something to push against and off of in the other direction. The entirety, and therefore you also understand the bias it produces because your vector, like it's a perverse relationship. See, if you say all of this rational choice model is wrong, I can show it and I can, and it's very generative. You come up with the representative, all these beautiful heuristics, but the vector you're following is created by pushing off of the rational choice model. So it is also sort of limited. And so ultimately, that interface created this body of evidence. And then that body of evidence gave the ammunition needed for behavioral economists to be able to show people, your models are mistaken. Then this sort of generation that was like, let me take that body of evidence and try to incorporate it into some formal modeling is where a lot of the trouble began. Because there's a lot of psychology.

The

idea of reductionism of the rich domain of the human mind to some way. So now there's tension. The tension being, I think most behavioral economists are looking for parsimonious models of human behavior slash mind that are more realistic, parsimonious, that capture most everything. Like that's what, that's what you kind of want. Now put on your psychologist hat. You'll be like, what are you even saying? Like to human, I mean, if you wrote down the greatest mysteries known to mankind that you go to any caveman or cave woman and ask them, what is mysterious? You'd be like the stars up there are mysterious. Death is mysterious. And how I'm having this conversation is mysterious. Like those are the three great mysteries of mankind. And you're going to tell me there's a little model that captures all of it? It's like, what are you, crazy? So there is now a tension that's pretty palpable, if that makes sense. And it's why behavioral economists and psychologists don't really have many conversations. There aren't many places you go to where there's much interaction. And that's partly why I'm not sure I come with psychology. I interact a lot with psychologists. I publish in psychology. I like psychology. Am I a behavioral economist? I don't know. It sounds a lot unclear. I'm not sure I buy into the idea that we're going to get a parsimonious model. I think we'll get parsimonious models that work, but not parsimonious models that are capturing big fractions of human behavior i mean how is that even possible how could we hope for that and maybe that's yeah to

the question of labels what do you tell people you are i've

given up i don't yeah i just i don't i mean i don't know i don't even know like know what's so funny?