Behavioural economics, data science and artificial intelligence.| Jason Collins blog
Experimental psychology research before the mid-2010s was a mess. The field was littered with papers with weak to non-existent theoretical foundations. Experimental data was unavailable. (The statement “data is available on request” is somewhat of a joke.) The experiments involved small samples and barely significant p-values. File drawers were overflowing with the carcasses of experiments that didn’t quite get the result hoped for. The forking paths in the data analysis allowed multipl...| Jason Collins blog
This article was intended for a different forum. When that didn’t work out, I decided to park it here. – Professor of Sociology William H. Sewell was deeply interested in social mobility. Do career aspirations affect career achievement? Do individual and social traits underlie those aspirations? Despite some preliminary research in the 1950s, Sewell lacked the data to answer these questions. In 1962, Sewell made a lucky discovery: sitting unused in a University of Wisconsin administration...| Jason Collins blog
This reading list is a balance to the one-dimensional view in many popular books, TED talks, conferences, academic press releases and consultancy sales pitches. For those who feel they have a good understanding of the literature after reading Thinking Fast and Slow, Predictably Irrational and Nudge, this is for you. [In the time since I drafted the first version of this list in 2017, it’s fair to say that the balance has swung a bit.] The purpose of this reading list is not to imply that al...| Jason Collins blog
In his book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, Ethan Mollick describes an experiment by Fabrizio Dell’Acqua: In a different paper, Fabrizio Dell’Acqua shows why relying too much on AI can backfire. He found that recruiters who used high-quality AI became lazy, careless, and less skilled in their own judgment. They missed out on some brilliant applicants and made worse decisions than recruiters who used low-quality AI or no AI at all. He hired 181 professional recruiters and gave...| Jason Collins blog
The books I enjoyed the most in 2024, although all were published in different years: Ashlee Vance, When the Heavens Went on Sale: For all the grumbling about how progress in software isn’t matched in the physical world, Vance tells some amazing stories. The tale about how Planet Labs got going using smartphone technology to make shoebox size satellites was fantastic. Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t: Wonderfully practical. I enter almost...| Jason Collins blog
The below are my speaking notes for a presentation in the Innovative methodologies in behavioural science session at BI Connect 2024, hosted by the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA) in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. The notes reflect many of the themes discussed in more detail in a previous post on megastudies. When BETA posts the video of the session, I will link here. --- I’m going to start with a story about a competition held by Netflix. They ...| Jason Collins blog
If you ever read a claim of an AI outperforming a human, dig into the performance data to check out the human benchmark. The mediocrity of the human is often more salient than the competence of the AI. The AI has an easy job. Here’s an example from a paper by Ayers and friends (2023). They sampled 195 question and response exchanges on Reddit’s r/AskDocs and entered those same questions into ChatGPT 3.5. Responses by the Reddit physicians and ChatGPT were then independently rated for qual...| Jason Collins blog
I wrote this post based on notes for a proposed “lunch and learn” session. Illness got in the way, so rather than let those notes sit on the shelf, I’ve cleaned them up to share here. Many points were intended to be (provocative) conversation prompts rather than statements, so a few parts are light on evidence or end with a question. --- In the first half of 2023, A manifesto for applying behavioural science was published in Nature Human Behaviour. Written by the head of the North Ameri...| Jason Collins blog
Each year I teach an undergraduate subject in behavioural economics. I have pulled together the notes for the subject into a website, which you can find here. The notes include the subject content, plus “exercises” that form the basis for the tutorials. If you work through the content, you’re effectively getting the same content as my students, minus the interactive seminars with me, tutorials with the teaching assistants, and the assessments. I have also developed a set of videos to ac...| Jason Collins blog
In 2012, I wrote a post titled Chimps 1, Humans 0 after seeing videos of a chimp named Ayumu. Ayumu could recall the location of numbers, in order, flashed briefly on a screen. Ayumu’s performance far exceeded my feeble attempts. See the below videos to get a sense of the task. The human Ayumu This performance, documented by Inoue and Matsuzawa (2007) in Current Biology, was used to assert that chimps have superior working memory to humans. The claim has spread widely, as a brief search on ...| Jason Collins blog
My first job out of university was as a lawyer. Later, when I switched to a non-legal role, I enrolled in a Master of Laws. I selected some subjects relevant to my new job and that might be useful if I wanted to return to a legal firm. Among other subjects, I studied constitutional theory, international trade law, human rights law and energy law. How much do I know about those topics today? I can’t remember what we covered in constitutional theory, except for a recollection that we kicked o...| Jason Collins blog
From a recent Journal of Political Economy paper by Stefano DellaVigna, Woojin Kim and Elizabeth Linos (2024): We study 30 US cities that ran 73 RCTs with a national nudge unit. Cities adopt a nudge treatment into their communications in 27% of the cases. We find that the strength of the evidence and key city features do not strongly predict adoption; instead, the largest predictor is whether the RCT was implemented using preexisting communication, as opposed to new communication. A nudge wit...| Jason Collins blog
I first wrote a version of this post in April 2023. A lot has changed since then in both the tools and how I use them. As was the case then, if you want a sense of the frontier, others such as Ethan Mollick will give you a better flavour. But if you’re after some practical examples, you might find this useful. My toolkit I use multiple tools, switching between them depending on the task and comparing the responses. I want to gain a sense of the frontier. As an academic, I gain free access t...| Jason Collins blog
This post was my plan for a presentation at the Foundation of Utility and Risk Conference. I drew on my previous posts laying out the foundations of ergodicity economics and examining what ergodicity economics states about risk preferences. This varied somewhat from delivery (I’m easily waylaid and skipped a couple of sections). Given it’s to a technical audience, there are a few moments that might lose the lay reader. – Introduction This presentation started with a blog post. Around fi...| Jason Collins blog
Behavioural and data science. Economics. Evolutionary biology.| Jason Collins blog
When we analyse experimental data, we have many choices. What observations do we exclude? What variables do we compare? What statistical tests do we use? And so on. These choices lead us into what is often called the garden of forking paths. The problem is that some paths lead to a “significant” result. Hurrah! Publication on the way. Others lead nowhere. So when we read a published paper, you might ask: did they choose their path because it led to a significant result? One solution to th...| Jason Collins blog
Social science a mess, journals no good, the meaningless of the label “misinformation”, Flipper Zero, and cleaning up the list of named “biases”: Social science is a mess and it’s not getting better. A few years old, but a lot of gold. A few nuggets: Economics topped the charts in terms of expectations, and it was by far the strongest field. There are certainly large improvements to be made — a 2/3 replication rate is not something to be proud of. But reading their papers you get ...| Jason Collins blog
These are the books I enjoyed the most in 2023, although they were published in different years: Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: I love the sense of place that Abbey creates. Paige Harden, The Genetic Lottery: Harden’s politics seep through the text, and it is slightly irritating to be constantly labelled a eugenicist. However, it contains an accessible explanation of the science with many great examples. Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles: I bought it for the kids, but I suspect it’s b...| Jason Collins blog
In late April 2020, a group of behavioural scientists (Van Bavel et al., 2020) published a paper in Nature Human Behaviour, “Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response”. They provided a range of suggestions for policy makers. The paper sparked some debates about the readiness of behavioural science to inform the pandemic response. One of these critiques was in an article by IJzerman et al. (2020), which advised caution when applying behavioural science to p...| Jason Collins blog
I firmly believe in going straight to the source before sharing a story I’ve heard elsewhere. Here is another example of why. In a recent article in Behavioral Scientist, Adam Grant writes: In a clever study, economists wanted to find out whether students really learn more from experts. They collected data on every freshman at Northwestern University from 2001 to 2008. They investigated whether freshmen did better in their second course in a subject if their introductory class was taught by...| Jason Collins blog
Over a decade ago when I started reading the behavioural economics literature, John List quickly became one of my favourite academics. Whenever I read an interview with List he always seemed to ask great, critical questions. He was rarely happy taking others’ assumptions as given. I saw him as someone who, on hearing “in my experience….”, would be the first to say “Should we run an experiment?”. My impression of List has somewhat changed in the last year. His Twitter posts seem mo...| Jason Collins blog