Posts

Dead rats and dopamine - a new publication

My new paper, coauthored with Yohan John , Dakota McCoy and Oliver Braganza , is out in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. " Dead rats, dopamine, performance metrics and peacock tails " is about the universal emergence of proxy failure. When you measure and incentivise performance by a single metric (a proxy), the proxy will always become a worse measure of performance than it was before you added the incentive. This effect is also known as Goodhart's Law  in economics, and by other names in other fields - but the same underlying process drives the effect across multiple domains. Our paper studies it in management, economics, biology, neuroscience and other areas. Recent concerns about AI alignment are closely related to this phenomenon. The paperclip problem is a good example - if a sufficiently clever AI is given a single goal, to produce as many paperclips as possible, it may eventually destroy all of humanity and take over the whole universe in its efforts to maximise o

How to debunk an electoral fraud claim

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There are plenty of claims of US election fraud floating around this week. Most of them fall into three categories: Too vague to be meaningfully evaluated or investigated Too small to matter (a few individual ballots being challenged here and there, possibly valid but not enough to affect the results) Too wild to stand up to any kind of scrutiny Together, these claims are certainly problematic: they create a fog of doubt about the legitimacy of the democratic process. But a fourth category is more insidious. A twitter mutual retweeted the thread quoted below. You can click through to read the whole thread, but I have embedded the highlights. It's a well-told story, with several characteristics that make it effective - as well as dangerous. To start with, the data comes from an authoritative source, the New York Times. Even better in this case: a source associated with "the other side". Surely the liberals can't deny the truths from their own newspaper? The followin

Predictions for the next decade in Behavioral Science

Behavioral Scientist have put together their favourite predictions, ideas, worries and challenges in the field of behavioral science for the next decade. We were delighted they accepted our pitch on cogitive economics as one of the new oppportunities in the future! Here is our prediction for the future - what is yours? "The twenty-first century is pushing us toward an ever more digital, information-driven, persuasion-based global economy—just as a new set of tools are emerging in neuroscience and psychology that offer the power to understand these phenomena in a new way. Cognitive economics is a new field rooted in behavioral economics, paralleling the shift from behavioral to cognitive psychology. Rather than focusing on biases in choices between material goods, cognitive economists explore how people consume intangible products with their minds. Consumers no longer strive to acquire only material goods or earn the most money. Instead, they seek purpose, symbolic value, inte

Am I the person Dominic Cummings is looking for? A followup to The Times

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For those interested in a bit more background to my Times article today , here are some details on how Cummings's topics have showed up in my cognitive economics research. You can judge for yourself if I have spotted what he is working towards. Starting with Judea Pearl's modelling of causality. Pearl developed a way of using graphs (a kind of diagram showing a network of relationships between objects – like the chocolate example below) to express and work out cause-and-effect relationships. For example, you might use them to determine whether smoking causes cancer, or carbon dioxide causes global warming – or more locally, whether cutting Universal Credit reduces unemployment. Quite often, we find that when scientists discover something about the structure of the world, the human brain has got there before us. The brain has evolved to seek out cause-and-effect relations in the world around us, and assemble them into a graph just like this. It learns the relationships by o

Other writers on System 3

Since last year I have been discussing the idea of "System 3" - a set of mental capabilities and processes involved in imagination and mental simulation. These capabilities appear to be used for several mental activities, notably: planning and thinking about the future counterfactual reasoning daydreaming and mind-wandering consumption of fiction mental replay of past experiences and in empathetically considering how other people experience an event Recently some other writers in the market research industry and elsewhere have been discussing System 3. Here are some of their thoughts: Kathryn Ambroze at HCD with  a detailed writeup of a System 3 approach including examples Ambroze also takes an in-depth look at different models of thought, contextualising  System 3 as a way to model future thinking or prospection Thomas George of DoWell Research, on using System 3 to build brands Brian Carruthers of WARC, reviewing my System 3 talk at IIeX Amsterdam ESOMAR

Book review: Alchemy, by Rory Sutherland

Rory Sutherland's new book Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don't Make Sense  continues his 10-year campaign against the traditional, logical pursuit of business advantage, through a scientific lens that includes several cognitive economics themes. As ever, a curated series of amusing anecdotes about people or companies who took an unusual angle on marketing or product invention, fuel a philosophical wander. That philosophy could be summarised as: if it makes sense, someone's already tried it. So try something that doesn't . The ideas that underpin the book are broadly based on behavioural economics and cognitive science, with bits of evolutionary theory, statistics and old-fashioned advertising intuition thrown in. At first it doesn't look like a behavioural science book as such: the theoretical backbone takes a while to show. Rory's style is discursive: an after-dinner-talk of anecdotes, dismantling of conventional wisdom, ever-so-slightly outr

From Behavioral to Cognitive Pricing

Below is an article by Leigh published in INsights magazine. The magazine published by the Neuromarketing Science & Business Association. See the article in its full glory here or just the text below. Behavioral pricing has been used for many years but is essentially based on changing customers' behavior without creating new value. Cognitive pricing is a new paradigm in which the customer's positive mental experience can be given a monetary value. The ability of companies to earn premium prices for their products and services is under threat. The rise of the Internet in general, and price comparison websites in particular, makes it easier for consumers to compare products, harder for brands to stand out from the competition, and risks turning many categories of product into commodities. And being commoditized usually means lower profits and less innovation. The emergence of behavioral economics gave marketers a new set of tools to maintain an edge: the techniques of