Posts Tagged ‘economic psychology’
I choose… me!
People in Western countries drown in choice. Want a T-shirt? Thousands of alternatives await you. Want some toothpaste? Sit down, we could be here a while. Many people see these options as a good thing – they’re a sign of our independence, our freedom, our mastery over our own destinies. But these apparent positives have a dark side.
Krishna Savani from Columbia University has found that when Americans think about the concept of choice, they’re less concerned about the public good and less empathic towards disadvantaged people. His work supports the idea that endless arrays of choice focus our attention on individual control and, by doing so, they send a message that people’s fates are their own concerns. Their lives are not the business of the state or public institutions, and if they fail, it is their own fault. With choices at hand, Americans are more likely to choose themselves.
Savani’s experiments and their results make for pretty bracing reading. Still, he notes, not all cultures react the same way. And as for Americans,
… Savani points out that the US is one of the world’s most charitable countries. He writes, “If Americans believe that they are choosing to help other people out of their free will, or if they can affirm their selves through making choices for other people, they may be even more charitable.” The problem lies more with “choice for choice’s sake.”
Read the whole story in Discover.
As we resolve to simplify, we might recall that it was on this date in 1718 that London lawyer, writer, and inventor, James Puckle patented a multi-shot gun mounted on a stand capable of firing up to nine rounds per minute– the first machine gun.
Puckle’s innovation was as formative in the realm of intellectual property as it was in the martial arena: Quoth to the Patent Office of the United Kingdom,”In the reign of Queen Anne of Great Britain, the law officers of the Crown established as a condition of patent that the inventor must in writing describe the invention and the manner in which it works.” Puckle’s machine gun patent was among the first to provide such a description.
The Annals of Solipsism: Charting Charts…
Readers will have noticed that your correspondent is something of a sucker for information, graphs, and infographics. Imagine then his delight in discovering this chart comparing the relative effectiveness of different kinds of charts:
From I Love Charts, where much more illumination awaits.
As we resolve not to serve pie unless our readers have lots of time to digest it, we might mark the passing of sociologist, criminologist and social psychologist Gabriel Tarde; he died on this date in 1904. Tarde conceived sociology as based on small psychological interactions among individuals (much as if it were chemistry), the fundamental forces being imitation and innovation; he conceived “the group mind” (sometimes advanced to explain so-called herd behavior or crowd psychology), and economic psychology (in which he anticipated a number of modern developments… indeed, he may be spinning in his grave to have become, as his work did, an inspiration to the “Chicago School” of economists). But Tarde’s fame was posthumous; his thinking was overshadowed at the time by Émile Durkheim and his conception of society as a collective unity.
Gabriel Tarde (source)
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