Behavioral Economics

The worldwide economy is still shaky, and retailers are hoping that the holiday shopping season will help to improve their revenues. The stores are working hard with sales and other promotions to encourage you to buy more. If you are planning to do some holiday shopping for your family and friends (and yourself), how can you take advantage of holiday deals without breaking your budget? Read More

The Great Depression transformed ordinary consumers into resourceful hunters and gatherers who learned how to salvage, recycle, and re-use clothes, food, building materials and other things that in a more prosperous era would have been shunned or discarded as trash. Shame and embarrassment fell away as this new mindset spread. Now I'm wondering whether we will see a similar societywide psychological transformation during the New Depression, or whatever we're going to call a crisis that currently finds over 17 percent of Americans unemployed. As money grows surrealistically scarce, will our values change? And will scavengers -- thrift-shoppers, Dumpster divers, Freecyclers, and barterers -- become role models admired by millions? Read More

You may be surprised.
Last week twenty-year-old Jim told his mother that he has always been leery of his younger, but larger brother, Andrew. Jim's cautiousness around Andrew dates back to the time Andrew shoved him off a dump truck breaking both of Jim's wrists.   Read More

Radical changes are in store when Charles Darwin and Daniel Kahneman are properly introduced to one another. On the evolutionary view, what seems irrational at the surface level may be, on closer examination, deeply rational. Read More

In the first week of November, I was an invited speaker at the Cognition Emotion and Motivation conference that is in Tunisia every two years. Most of the attendees at the meeting were from Tunisia or from other French speaking countries. So, the conference was a great way to catch up on research being done that is not typically published in the Psychology journals published in English. I will have more to say about that in a future post.

But, first, a few words on haggling and why it is so difficult to do well. Read More

Here are 3 persuasion strategies for increasing tips. Read More

Unemployment has reached its highest level in 26 years.  If you're un-, or under-employed this one's for you.  It's for you too if your children recently moved out,  if you just quit a club or ended a friendship or partnership. Really, its for anyone whose life somehow became less populated recently.
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With synergy it's not that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, it's less. Read More

In philosophy, religion, work, and play, human beings tend to seek for meaning in their lives. We enjoy occupations that have meaning, and we can become quickly frustrated if we sense the pointlessness of a task. In the psychological literature, meaning is sometimes viewed as one of the strongest motivating factors in human behavior; a concept that fits well also with common intuitions of what drives human behavior. Despite the seemingly obvious importance of meaning in determining occupational choices, only few economic studies appear to consider the role that a job's "meaning" may have on the behavior of labor market participants... Read More