Ah, science............................

............................Trouble brewing for nascent field of "behavioral economics"?

When the two biggest scientists in your field are accused of "systemic misrepresentation", you know you've got a serious problem. . . .

Which leads me to the final point I'd like to make: rules and generalizations are overrated.

The reason that fields like behavioral economics are so seductive is because they promise people easy, cookie-cutter solutions to complicated problems. . . .

 This is because almost every lab-based study omits one key variable, which I'll call "situational fit". In a sense that's the point of the scientific process: to control for every variable except for the one you're interested in—to find effects that generalize across contexts. However, humans are not billiard balls or hydrogen atoms. We're remarkably complex and will react to the same stimuli in quite different ways depending on the circumstances. This is one of the fundamental flaws of lab based behavioral science research. It puts humans in bizarre contexts and assumes that their behavior in an unnatural setting will generalize to complex, natural settings. This happens to (almost) never be the case. Just because people are affected one way in a lab at UC Berkeley doesn't mean they'll be impacted the same way when sitting at home on the couch or while chatting with friends at the bar.

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