The Unlikely Story of Behavioral Economics
Two great podcasts. Three years of recording and research. Interviews with the Nobel Laureates, esteemed professors, and policymakers at the heart of a movement. It all combines to tell the unlikely story of how a group of tenacious thinkers pushed back against tradition and built ideas with impact.
Across this five-part series, we tell the story of how some young social scientists took issue with assumptions that economists were making about how people make decisions, and how they ended up transforming the field. Their insights went on to shape governments and businesses around the world.
In a special collaboration with the podcast Behavioral Grooves, we’ve produced a 5-episode series on the growth and influence of this movement in Economics.
Guests
Thanks to everyone who lent their voice to this project!
- Channing Jang (Busara Center for Behavioral Economics)
- Colin Camerer (Caltech)
- Daniel Kahneman (Princeton University)
- David Halpern (Behavioural Insights Team)
- David Yokum (The Policy Lab, Brown University)
- Drazen Prelec (MIT)
- Eric Wanner (Russell Sage Foundation)
- George Loewenstein (Carnegie Mellon University)
- Liam Delaney (London School of Economics and Political Science)
- Linda Babcock (Carnegie Mellon University)
- Linnea Gandhi (Wharton)
- Mike Gaetani (Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences)
- Rahul Bhui (MIT)
- Richard Nisbett (University of Michigan)
- Richard Thaler (University of Chicago Booth School of Business)
- Sendhil Mullainathan (University of Chicago Booth School of Business)
- Shlomo Benartzi (UCLA Anderson School of Management)
- Stephen Roll (Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis)
- Supreet Kaur (UC Berkeley)
- Also thanks to Bill Congdon for additional insights on the White House SBST.
TranscriptS
Download PDF versions of the episode transcripts, including references in the footnotes…
- Episode 1: Beyond Anomalies
- Episode 2: Importing Psychology
- Episode 3: Children of Unlikely Parents
- Episode 4: Behavioral Economics Goes Mainstream
- Episode 5: The Future
Teaching Materials
We think this podcast series is a useful way to introduce students to behavioral economics and behavioral science more generally. Although these episodes should be accessible to a broad range of people, we think they probably lend themselves best to undergraduate students.
To help implement this podcast into your classroom, we developed a listening guide [PDF] that students can use as they go through the series. Each episode gets its own page in the guide. For each, we give a brief outline of the episode along with 6-8 open-ended questions that students can use to ensure they’re getting the main points and to think broadly about key themes.
(If you do use this in your classroom, please direct students to the podcast episodes hosted online. Do not download the episodes and share those files directly. Thanks!)
Corrections
In Episode 5, we mistakenly said that people “don’t take as many risks when they’re framed as potential losses…even though they’re relatively happy to take risks when they’re framed as potential gains.” We accidentally got this flipped! In truth, research on prospect theory shows that people tend to be risk-seeking in the loss domain but risk-averse in the gain domain.
