Sunday, May 03, 2015

3rd May 2015 Behavioural Science Links

1. Enlightenment 2.0: Restoring sanity to our politics, our economy, and our lives (via Marginal Revolution)

2. NYT piece on the links between the APA and the CIA torture programme.

3. Andrew Gelman on the bad things that happen when we don't take measurement seriously.

4. Nature piece on the first results from Psychology's largest replication exercise. Everyone involved in empirical social science should follow this and related work. Mass replications are a relatively recent phenomenon in these areas and need a lot more discussion. It is great to see them but it is clearly not so simple to replicate complex psychology experiments from across decades. The conditions under which a psychology experiment can be replicated precisely are also worth discussing further,

5. A-level Economics will now include material on behavioural economics. Worth discussing for high-school economics programmes around the world.

6. BIT is recruiting again. I presented there in March and two of our MSc programme graduates from last year work there. I can testify to the very vibrant atmosphere there. It looks like a great place to work.

7. Roland Fryer was awarded the Bates Clarke medal, basically an Economics Nobel for under-40s. His work is available here. The award text is well worth reading and available here
Roland Fryer is an influential applied microeconomist whose work spans labor economics, the economics of education, and social problems and social interactions.  His innovative and creative research contributions have deepened our understanding of the sources, magnitude, and persistence of U.S. racial inequality.  He has made substantial progress in evaluating the policies that work and do not work to improve the educational outcomes and economic opportunities of children from disadvantaged backgrounds.  His theoretical and empirical work on the “acting white” hypothesis of peer effects provides new insights into the difficulties of increasing the educational investments of minorities and the socially excluded.  Fryer is the leading economist working on the economics of race and education, and he has produced the most important work in recent years on combating the racial divide, one of America’s most profound and long-lasting social problems. He has mastered tools from many disciplines to tackle difficult research topics.  Fryer has developed and implemented compelling randomized field experiments in large U.S. urban school districts to evaluate education interventions.  He founded EdLabs (the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard University) in 2008 to facilitate such efforts and continues as its director.  He has incorporated insights from psychology to formulate a new model of discrimination based on categorization, and he has used detailed historical archival research to understand the origins and spread of the Ku Klux Klan.
8.  14th TIBER Symposium on Psychology and Economics, Tilburg - call for papers

9. "Early intervention and child health: Evidence from a Dublin-based randomized controlled trial"

10. Which, the influential UK consumer group, is recruiting - "Principal Behavioural Insight researcher in the Which? policy division". Links here and here.

11. New paper on "On the misplaced politics of behavioral policy interventions".

12. HBR: "A short history of modern decision making, from John von Neumann to Daniel Kahneman"

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