Re: Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [PEN-L] Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews

I wrote:
> >FWIW, academic psychology involves a lot of
> >experiments, as does so-called "behavioral economics"

DD:
> Asking non-rhetorically, is psychology a social science
> and if so why?  I tend to call the "social sciences"
> economics, sociology and political science, the idea
> being vaguely that these three commit you to reifying
> social entities.

what is or is not a "social science" is partly a matter of convention. It makes sense to me to see psychology as a social science to the extent that it talks about individuals in relation to each other.

> I have to say I've never had much time for behavioural
> economics precisely because I don't like its attempt to
> import experimental methodology into a social field.  I
> don't think that anyone who claims to take "framing
> effects" seriously has any business in continuing to
> spend effort on finding out how graduate economics
> students behave in experimental situations.

My colleague seems to take framing effects seriously, while experimental economics doesn't just deal with graduate students. 

A recent study reported a growing body of experimental evidence suggests that we reject the "economists' canonical assumption that individuals are entirely self-interested: in addition to their own material pay-offs, many experimental subjects appear to care about fairness and reciprocity, are willing to change the distribution of material outcomes at personal cost, and are willing to reward those who do not, even when these actions are costly to the individual" (Henrich, et al., 2001). The studies involved samples from lots of places around the world.

The full reference is:

Henrich, Joseph, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis, and Richard McElreath. 2001. In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies. _American Economic Review_. 91(2) May: 73-78.

Jim