THE FATE OF CLIMATE GATESMANSHIP: HACKING HUMAN NATURE

GATESMANSHIP HAS EARNED A SPACE ON THE CLIMATEBALL BINGO CARD, AS THE JAWS OF FOX NEWS SNAP AT THE TRIBULATIONS OF 

                    Hacking Human Nature for Good

At a 2016 seminar launching the White House Social and Behavioral Science Team as a permanent part of the Executive bureaucracy,  Presidential Science Advisor John Holdren said.

 "As President Obama noted in his Executive Order 13707, behavioral science insights can support a wide range of national priorities ... accelerating the transition to a low carbon economy...

Order, 13707, directs Federal agencies to apply behavioral science insights, and… identify promising opportunities to apply behavioral science insights to their programs and policies."

Now one of the team's founders has challenged its seminal 2014  workbook, 

Hacking Human Nature for Good:

A Practical Guide to Changing Human Behavior 

 

by Dan Ariely , Jason Hreha ,& Kristen Berman

  

Because, as Nature Briefing notes,  some of its data was fabricated and has since been retracted:

Honesty study retracted over faked data

An influential 2012 paper about how to promote honesty when filling out forms will be retracted because it was based on fabricated data. The authors had already published a 2020 study showing that the original paper’s conclusions could not be replicated. As part of that replication effort, the original data were opened up to scrutiny, eventually leading to anonymous data-integrity sleuths at the Data Colada blog to uncover “that the data were fabricated… beyond any shadow of a doubt”.

BuzzFeed News | 13 min read 

Reference: PNaS paper 1 (to be retracted) & PNaS paper 2 

The death of 

behavioral economics

By Jason Hreha

I've got some bad news. Behavioral economics is dead.

Yes, it's still being taught.

Yes, it's still being researched by academics around the world.

Yes, it's still being used by practitioners and government officials across the globe.

It sure does look alive... but it's a zombie—inside and out.

Why do I say this? Two primary reasons:
Core behavioral economics findings have been failing to replicate for several years, and *the* core finding of behavioral economics, loss aversion, is on ever more shaky ground.

Its interventions are surprisingly weak in practice...

If you're interested in making applied behavioral science your career, I would strongly encourage you to stay clear of behavioral economics.

If you're someone who works at a company, I strongly encourage you to work with someone who is not solely reliant on the field.

If you're simply interested in learning more about human behavior and the brain, I would steer clear of the field altogether.

Let's cover each point in more depth:

1. Core findings are failing to replicate...

Here are a couple of high profile examples:

• The Identifiable Victim Effect (featured in the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014)

• Priming (featured in Nudge, Cialdini's books, and Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow)

But the biggest replication failures relate to the field's most important idea: loss aversion.

To be honest, this was a finding that I lost faith in well before the most recent revelations (from 2018-2020). Why? Because I've run studies looking at its impact in the real world—especially in marketing campaigns.