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The Situationist

Dan Kahneman on the Situation of IntuitionYesterday

In Part I of his 2007 Hitchcock Lectures (titled “Explorations of the Mind - Intuition: The Marvels and the Flaws“), Daniel Kahneman explores the idea of intuition:

For a sample of other Situationist posts related to Kahneman’s work, see “Dan Kahneman’s Situation,” “The Situation of Financial Risk-Taking,” “Some (Interior) Situational Sources War – Part I,” and “Some (Interior) Situational Sources War – Part I

The Situation of ResolutionsJanuary 6

Just one week out into 2009, and many of us are already tripping up on our resolutions.   It’s another case of our disposition being weaker than our situation.  Here are a couple of excerpts that shed some light on the interior situation of our resolve.

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From Sam Sommers’ excellent post “A Once-a-Year Reality Check“:

. . . . I was surprised to hear that one of my aforementioned vital signs was not in the “normal” range one would expect.

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You’d be amazed at the mental gymnastics I went through in order to convince myself that this was some sort of mistake. The room where the screening took place was hot and crowded. They were disorganized enough that they could have transposed digits or confused samples. It was the midterm crunch and I, like everyone else there, was even more stressed than usual. The election was coming up and I had stayed up too late the night before reading polls on line. Seriously. I remember telling myself that.

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We do this type of thing all

Taking Behavioralism Seriously (Part I) - Abstract and Top Ten ListJanuary 5

Doug Kysar and Situationist contributor Jon Hanson recently posted on SSRN their important 1999 article, Taking Behavioralism Seriously: The Problem of Market Manipulation (74 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 363) on SSRN. Here is the article’s abstract.

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For the past few decades, cognitive psychologists and behavioral researchers have been steadily uncovering evidence that human decisionmaking processes are prone to nonrational, yet systematic, tendencies. These researchers claim not merely that we sometimes fail to abide by rules of logic, but that we fail to do so in predictable ways.

With a few notable exceptions, implications of this research for legal institutions were slow in reaching the academic literature. Within the last few years, however, we have seen an outpouring of scholarship addressing the impact of behavioral research over a wide range of legal topics. Indeed, one might predict that the current behavioral movement eventually will have an influence on legal scholarship matched only by its predecessor, the law and economics movement. Ultimately, any legal c

Behavioral Economics and PolicyJanuary 4

Last month, Rick Montgomery wrote an interesting article, “Behavioral Economics Is Moving from Theory to Policy,” for the Kansas City Star.  Here are some excerpts.

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As the economy sinks and investors buckle over, the behavior buffs are rising up.

From the lesser-appointed corners of academia, psychologists, sociologists and a youthful breed of economists scoff at the revered mathematical models that have driven economic thought and snared Nobel Prizes.

These preachers of “behavioral economics,” including some on President-elect Barack Obama’s economic team, argue that humans cannot be relied upon to obey the efficient, orderly tenets espoused by free-market thinkers.

Chief among the old-school rules is the assumption that we act rationally with money.

“That’s absurd, counterfactual . . . and now they’ve created a catastrophe,” said William Black, who teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Until now, policymakers showed slight regard for the growing field of study into how mortal gaffes and greed intersect with financ

John Darley on “Justice as Intuitions” - VideoJanuary 2

At the 2007 Project on Law and Mind Sciences Conference, John Darley’s talk was titled “Justice as Intuitions.”  Here is the abstract for his talk.

When a person receives a description of an individual committing a specific crime, the person rapidly forms judgments on the severity of the offense and the duration of appropriate punishment for it. Evidence is converging that those judgments are what we would now call “intuitive” judgments. Rather than being the result of a reason-guided, step-by-step analysis, the severity and punishment judgments seem simply to “pop into” the heads of the respondents. Thus, they are similar to the heuristics, biases, and other shortcut decisions that we all use, as documented by the judgment and decision-making researchers. Imaging
research suggests that these intuitions draw on both evaluative and emotional areas of the brain. Behavioral research demonstrates that these intuitions are driven by intuitive ideas of “just deserts” (i.e., retributive reactions rather than more re