Actual economist here. Not a behavioral economist but some of my good friends are!
- Priming is social psychology, not behavioral economics. Most behavioralists I know are openly scornful of priming studies, which as the author correctly notes often do not replicate. (Leading example of the kind of thing behavioralists think is BS: “prime people with words like ‘Florida’ or ‘retired’ and they will walk more slowly.”). That kind of study rarely if ever published in Econ journals.
- For his other claim that “Most behavioral interventions don’t replicate,” I would say that most behavioral economists don’t study or design interventions! Much of their work is experimental in nature and focuses on developing more realistic decision-theoretic mathematical models of choice which can be applied in economic modeling outside the lab.
What the author actually has in mind is not contemporary behavioral economics, but rather a subset of social psychology.
Those results used to receive reasonably wide media coverage and were taught to MBAs (generally not by the economists!), but starting around 2010 a bunch of very serious critiques of their statistical methods were raised which undermined confidence in the entire enterprise.
I was also hoping for more talk about why the author thought behavioral economics was fundamentally flawed as a concept, rather than just having flaws in some of it’s methodologies. I can only barely remember a time before economists actually believed that people were anything but ‘spherical cows’. When I was getting an undergrad degree in econ, the behavioral stuff felt like an enormous breath of fresh air, like ‘what if not everyone behaves rationally all the time? what does that do to this prevailing theory?’ I still think it’s an incredibly important field to study, especially if some of the core behaviors are being questioned. Knowing how humans behave to various incentives is incredibly useful, especially with all of the many collective action problems we face.
- Priming is social psychology, not behavioral economics. Most behavioralists I know are openly scornful of priming studies, which as the author correctly notes often do not replicate. (Leading example of the kind of thing behavioralists think is BS: “prime people with words like ‘Florida’ or ‘retired’ and they will walk more slowly.”). That kind of study rarely if ever published in Econ journals.
- For his other claim that “Most behavioral interventions don’t replicate,” I would say that most behavioral economists don’t study or design interventions! Much of their work is experimental in nature and focuses on developing more realistic decision-theoretic mathematical models of choice which can be applied in economic modeling outside the lab.
What the author actually has in mind is not contemporary behavioral economics, but rather a subset of social psychology.
Those results used to receive reasonably wide media coverage and were taught to MBAs (generally not by the economists!), but starting around 2010 a bunch of very serious critiques of their statistical methods were raised which undermined confidence in the entire enterprise.