In Their Own Words — Appelbaum

— “Governments generally operate on the assumption that people are rational. One of the basic implications of mainstream economic theory is that public policy works best when people are treated as rational decision makers.  Yet a growing body of research has found that people are not only irrational on occasion, but they tend to be irrational in some consistent and predictable ways. People tend to be influenced by the last thing they heard. They tend to fear losses more than they like profits. They tend to be a little lazy.  And researchers from this new school argue the government should account for these tendencies.” 

Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times writing on the work of the White House’s “Social and Behavioral Sciences Team” to apply academic research on human behavior to the business of running a government.  Click here for more.

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