Reaching Out As A Scientist

I firmly believe that scientists have the obligation to reach out to society, and do so in an agile and timely way (at least as much as publication delays allow us). Putting my time and effort where my mouth is, I have just joined Psychology Today as a contributor. The first post in my blog “Decisions and the Brain” there is on “Why We Are All Crooked Bankers.” I have also just covered the same research in a post in the Spanish blog Nada es Gratis, “Egoísmo eres tú: robando a las masas.“

Both posts cover my research article “Generous with individuals and Selfish to the Masses,” published in Nature Human Behaviour this year. It humbled me to see the impact that this article had beyond academic circles. It was covered in a large number of newspapers after acceptance, including newspapers as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or Le Temps, and popular-science magazines as New Scientist, Spektrum, or QUO. It was also covered in Nature as a Research Highlight, and I wrote about it in “Behind the Paper” at Nature: Behavioral and Social Sciences.

Updated Aims and Scope for the Journal of Economic Psychology

We have updated the Aims and Scope for JoEP:

The Journal of Economic Psychology aims to present research that will improve understanding of behavioral, in particular psychological, aspects of economic decisions and processes. It is published under the auspices of the International Association for Research in Economic Psychology, whose aim is to promote interdisciplinary work relating to economic behavior.

DFG Projekte und zusätzliche Forschungsfreisemester

Manchmal sind Deutsche päpstlicher als der Papst. Mit Verlaub.

Kleine Erklärung. Als gewählter Fachkollegiat des Fachkollegiums „Wirtschaftswissenschaften“ der Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) nehme ich seit drei Jahren an den Förderentscheidungen im Bereich Wirtschaftswissenschaften teil. Ich habe eine Menge individuelle Forschungsprojekte gesehen (sogenannten „Sachbeihilfen“), und ich habe an den Entscheidungen für mehrere größere Forschungsverbünde teilgenommen. Meine Amtszeit geht langsam zu Ende, und da ich jetzt in der Schweiz tätig bin, stehe ich nicht zur Wiederwahl.

Doctorarse con los dientes

“En España en este siglo no hay quien no sepa que se ha de morir de hambre como se entregue a las ciencias.”

 

Por desgracia, esta cita de José Cadalso (1741-1782), el autor de la novela epistolar Cartas Marruecas, permanece completamente vigente en la actualidad. Ya escribí con anterioridad sobre el inconsciente desmantelamiento de la ciencia española causado por medidas políticas poco responsables, y la situación por desgracia no ha mejorado (a ver si el nuevo ministro nos da una sorpresa). Esta vez quiero mencionar algo mucho más concreto, un hecho revelador que resulta asombroso cuando se contempla, como lo hago yo, desde el extranjero.

The Theory of Extensive Form Games

Together with my most-frequent coauthor Klaus Ritzberger, I have been working on the formal-analytical foundations of extensive form games for over 15 years now. Last year, we made a (considerable) effort and reorganized our published research on this topic. The result is a book, of course called The Theory of Extensive Form Games, published by Springer Verlag as part of the official series of the Game Theory Society, which was presented at the recent World Conference in Maastricht (2016).

If you know anything about how the academic world works, you might be wondering “Why would a researcher write a book?” Indeed. We serious academics get zero credit for books, since the only milestones in our careers are peer-reviewed research articles (caveat: I am speaking about social and natural sciences here). So investing time in writing books is, in terms of opportunity costs, a bad decision. And the target audience are other researchers and advanced grad students, so it’s not like we will make any serious money out of that (Springer recently sent us the data for 2016: we sold around a 100 copies, which is more than I expected). So why did we do it?

Economic Decisions and the EEG: An Example

Many neuroeconomics studies use fMRI machines. In my group, we currently concentrate on the electroencephalograph (EEG). The main reason is that we are interested in the analysis of decision processes in the brain, and the EEG has an excellent time resolution, while the fMRI is better for questions requiring a fine spatial resolution, e.g. brain localization.

An example of what the EEG can do for economic research, and in particular decision theory, is in a paper from my lab (Achtziger, Alós-Ferrer, Hügelschäfer, and Steinhauser, 2014), published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (with the lovely acronym SCAN). In case you are wondering, authors are in alphabetical order as per econ conventions; unlike neuroscientists, economists do not quibble about who has contributed more to a given paper.

Fairness is a Thin Layer

A quote attributed to Werner Herzog reads that “civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.” Some of my recent work together with Anja Achtziger and Alexander K. Wagner points out that the same might be true about fairness and pro-social behavior.

Take our 2015 article “Money, Depletion, and Prosociality in the Dictator Game,” published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics. Merely days after publication, it found some echo in the press, for instance here.

Coordination, Networks, and Technological Standards

Coordination games are a stylized model for, well, coordination problems. Think of computer operating systems. Windows, Mac, or Linux? Technological choice is also a good example. The past decades have seen quite a number of “format wars” in the multimedia sector, for instance when Sony-supported BluRay was able to wipe out the Toshiba-backed alternative HD-DVD format, each of them with back doors into people’s homes through gaming platforms (PS3 vs. XBox 360). Older generations (damn, I am getting old) will remember the battle between VHS and Betamax (remember the third format, Video 2000? You do? OK, you are officially old now!). Establishing a standard, in any field, always leads to a coordination game, from deciding which side of the street to drive on or adopting the metric system to establishing a particular container size for transport or adopting a management practice. If everybody adopts the same standard, nobody will want to deviate, hence we are at a Nash equilibrium, as explained in basic Game Theory. But every single standard is a Nash equilibrium, so which one should we coordinate on?

Multitasking or Multi-Wasting?

So you are a multitasker. SMSing, what’s-apping or whatever while you check your email while typing on that document you really have to finish today, or studying for an exam. But it’s all fine, because you are a multitasker. Duh.

Better think that over again.

Consider the work of Ophir, Nass, and Wagner (2009) in the prestigious journal PNAS. Using well-established performance tests from cognitive psychology, they compared “heavy media multitaskers,” that is, people used to work with lots of distractions, with “light” ones. The result? Heavy multitaskers think they are more productive. But they are completely wrong: they are actually less productive.

El desmantelamiento de la ciencia en España

Como catedrático de una universidad alemana dispongo de unos medios razonables para financiar mi investigación que me han permitido compaginar la teoría económica con la psicología y la neurociencia del comportamiento. No me quejo. Sin embargo, cada vez que me llegan noticias sobre la evolución del entorno científico en España, me entristezco profundamente. Lo que hace algunos años se podía describir como una “crisis de la ciencia hispana” hace tiempo que se ha convertido en un irresponsable desmantelamiento de la investigación en España.