As a follow-on post to summer 2023 exploratory work that is happening with the Behavioral Economics Research and Education (BERE) Lab, we’ve started to compile early results. Here are some test result summaries of different AI platforms based on the conjunction fallacy test (Linda problem). Note that platforms vary based on degree of live access to the internet and incorporation of slower System 2 thinking influences (although these characteristics are also confounded with platform implementation). Here we test ChatGPT 3.5, Bing Chat AI (based on GPT 4), and Google Bard.
Interesting questions to reflect on: – How do AI platforms differ? – Which gets things right? – Which do you trust? – To what extent will AI adoption get impacted by use case, accuracy, and trust?
For the past two summers, I have personally volunteered to spend time helping a limited number of students pursue interests in behavioral economics and build their resume of experiences. For this summer, I will expand my efforts somewhat, although I hope to eventually find a more sustainable and scalable model in terms of funding, operations, and potential synergies with other organizations.
Here’s the natural extension of what I’ll be doing for the summer of 2023.
The Behavioral Economics Research and Education (BERE) Lab by Stephen Shu is an effort geared toward helping college students and young professionals with either the empirical or applied practice of behavioral economics. BERE efforts are in support of open science and the advancement of education. Where possible, students or young graduates may be supported by grants, and BERE welcomes opportunities to help students and young graduates obtain grants or corporate sponsorship.
Students and young graduates may pursue exploratory replication studies, expansion research studies, and corporate-focused research (for use in educational settings). Where possible, students are encouraged to develop empirical or professional skills (e.g., R or Stata statistical software, Python programming, communications, writing).
The research theme for 2023 includes exploratory work around the intersection of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and behavioral economics, such as similarities and differences between AI and human decision making across different platforms.
I teach a couple of consulting projects-type courses at Cornell. One is a Grand Challenges capstone-class for Dyson undergraduates in helping companies and organizations address one or more of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. The other is a flagship-project class that is part the Masters in International Management program as part of the global CEMS Alliance, and it involves student collaborations and exchanges with 33 other top business schools and universities.
Each of these cohorts has different team compositions, problem statements, and situations to address for their client. Projects can involve diverse topics like addressing sustainability of the food supply chain and manufacturing capacity, promoting economic development and greater social equality in another continent, customer and market fit of a new product, workforce evolution given Gen Z, or marketing, branding, and product strategy for an international company.
Although projects are diverse and hard to find common bases of foundational knowledge, I have found it helpful to have bite-sized jump start material to help students get grounded. As part of the core, I have provided excerpts from my own book on bread and butter consulting concepts (for free), references to The So What Strategy for consultative communications, and a breathtaking short pocket reference to Scrum. These are all quite short books as evidenced by the spine thickness. People don’t have a lot of time to read given the heft and time pressures of projects.
Given that quite a few projects involve customer discovery, market fit, and/or diverse constituent interviews, I have decided to also add “Talking to Humans” as part of the reference books that I’ll draw from for these courses. It is a quick read book that can be completed in 1-2 hours. And it can be a great book to go back to for quick reference before doing any qualitative customer / product research.
TL;DR: This episode of “The Tao of Chao” podcast features Dr. Stephen Shu, a specialist in behavioral economics. The discussion explores how our decision-making processes are influenced by biases and cognitive frameworks rooted in our primal survival instincts. With the increasing volume of information and opinions available, our brains struggle to process it all, leading to echo chambers and confirmation biases. The conversation highlights the importance of recognizing our fast and slow thinking capabilities and encourages reflective thinking to counteract these biases and make better decisions in an ever-changing world.
TL;DR: A thinking tool called “prospective hindsight” can be used to explore different outcomes by imagining a future event and examining the steps that led to it. Avoidance in decision-making can stem from complexity, trade-offs, or a reluctance to consider negative outcomes. While it is impossible to predict the future accurately, a detailed planning process that considers both logic and emotions can help make more informed decisions. In investing, scenario planning and understanding the transmission mechanisms of events can improve decision-making, but it is essential to be aware of biases and actively seek counterfactual information. The abundance of data does not guarantee better decision-making, and the importance of information depends on the context and the significance of the decision.
A student recently asked me whether design thinking was different from behavioral economics thinking. In a nutshell, I believe the disciplines complement one another and should not be viewed as separate islands. That said, insights from behavioral economics and psychology can help us to become more thoughtful designers of products, customer experiences, etc.
One important behavioral area to consider is the role of memory in judgment and decision-making processes. Last week at Cornell Tech I facilitated a brief discussion of a new startup that was trying to address the issue of helping people to have perfect memory (as opposed to ever forgetting things). To what extent is this the perfect idea? What are some considerations from behavioral science?
To help feed that discussion, I relayed some results from a study by Eric Johnson and colleagues that provides substantiation for one theoretical role of memory in the decision-making process. Their study was conducted in the context of people valuing a commodity item, a coffee mug. In the classic example of the “endowment effect”, which is that people value things more when they possess an item (e.g., are given or endowed with a mug), people endowed with a mug, valued mugs at $6.01. People who were not endowed with a mug, valued mugs less at $3.72.
However, things got more interesting when the researchers manipulated the natural, unguided memory retrieval process. They manipulated the process by reversing the order in which people thought about things. Before having people value the mug, they essentially asked sellers to think about negative aspects of the mug, and they asked buyers to think about positive aspects of the mug. The endowment effect essentially vanished with sellers now valuing the mug at $5.05 and buyers valuing the mug at $4.91.
So memory retrieval order matters. If we go back to the startup example, and we have artificial intelligence (AI) based products remembering stuff so that we can make decisions, how should designers determine what to present to us first, knowing that presentation order may influence our decisions? Could presenting too many memories cause decision paralysis? If one is to pursue a product like the one described, the design choices are not trivial.
The bottom line is that hopefully we can improve our design reasoning by remembering to factor in insights from behavioral science.
Reference: Johnson, E.J., Häubl, G. and Keinan, A., 2007. Aspects of endowment: a query theory of value construction. Journal of experimental psychology: Learning, memory, and cognition, 33(3), p.461.
Let me first preface this post by saying two things: 1) the state of research in this area is very young (e.g., most citations in 2022 and 2023), and 2) my summary will be at risk of oversimplifying things and missing some nuance.
The students I have at Cornell Tech are really sharp and energized. In one class, an interesting question was raised about whether AI could be used as part of the testing process, such as to A/B pre-test interventions. To try to get a better understanding of this space, I sought to do a little research on to what extent AI decision making resembles human decision making. So today I shared findings from a working paper that I recently read (Chen et al., 2023). The paper covers 18 common human biases relevant to operational decision-making (e.g., judgments regarding risk, evaluation of outcomes, and heuristics in decision making, such as System 1 versus System 2 thinking).
Here’s a summary of differences between ChatGPT and humans:
Judgments Regarding Risk – ChatGPT seems to mostly maximize expected payoffs with risk aversion only demonstrated when expected payoffs equal. It does not understand ambiguity. Also, ChatGPT exhibits high overconfidence, perhaps due to its large knowledge base.
Evaluation of Outcomes – ChatGPT is sensitive to framing, reference points, and salience of information. No sensitivity to sunk costs or endowment effect (e.g., may not have physical or psychological ownership concept).
Heuristics in Decision Making – More research needed, although aspects such as confirmation bias present. Additionally, ChatGPT has the ability to generate both classic System 1 responses (incorrect answers by humans typically driven by fast, automatic thinking) and System 2 responses (correct answers, such as those by humans which typically require more slow, reflective thinking).
While the reasoning for these modes of responses is not fully known, it seems as though ChatGPT is extremely logical when it comes to things like maximizing expected value. However, perhaps due to its nature of trying to be conversational and responding to salient information provided by the user, it can be overly sensitive to framing effects.
There are surely a lot things to think about, opportunities to pursue, and research to pursue.
This past week I gave a talk to students part of the Hong Kong UST DBA Program regarding implementing behavioral finance initiatives in companies. The talk covered some case studies that varied in different dimensions relative to the degree of integration of science and degree of organizational complexity. I have often emphasized that organizations that want to implement behavioral initiatives need to consider dimensions of Goals, Research, Innovation, and Testing (GRIT) among other behavioral-specific considerations (e.g., choice, information, process, and personalization architecture).
However, one of the most striking parts of the discussion for me surrounded the notion of ethics, which has come up a number of times in my discussion with students.
Although I was only able to touch on two angles in my HKUST talk, for the core classes I teach, I offer at least three different lenses for thinking about behavioral economics and ethics: 1) goal alignment between the company and the end user, 2) nature of behavioral intervention design (e.g., how much control does it exert), and 3) moral foundations and considerations (e.g., care/harm, fairness).
There are clearly other considerations that could come into play (e.g., to what extent comfortable sharing behavioral intervention thinking publicly; legal versus ethical 2×2). However, it is good that students think through ethical considerations. Things aren’t always as black and white as we’d might like, so it’s important to have multiple lenses through which one can evaluate situations.
Based on request from a Cornell student, last night I gave a talk to the Phi Sigma Pi National Honor Fraternity. The talk was entitled, “The Future You” and was themed around different career and leadership lessons that I experienced over more than three decades of work experience from engineer to management consultant to applied behavioral economics expert.
As part of the talk, I posed the question to students as to whether they could predict where they would be or what they would like, say several decades from now.
To set the context as to how well people can predict their tastes, I described a study by Kahneman and Snell. In the study, participants were first given a sample taste of plain yogurt and asked to rate how much they liked it. Participants then committed to eating a full serving of yogurt every day for about a week. They were also asked to predict how much they thought they would like the yogurt over the next week.
During the sampling phase, people had some dislike of the yogurt and predicted that their dislike would get even worse over the course of eating yogurt for a week.
However, what actually happened? People had very strong dislike of eating yogurt on Day 1 and the trend went in the opposite direction than predicted where liking improved over time instead of worsening. By the end of the week, while people were still somewhat negative on liking plain yogurt, by Day 8 their degree of liking was higher, even higher than what they reported during their first sample taste.
If we can’t predict our tastes for something simple like plain yogurt over the course of a short period of time like a week, then what are our chances of predicting things over a long horizon or even more modest time horizons?
My takeaways were the following:
Forecasting is hard, even forecasting the future you.
Interests, preferences, and skills develop and compound over time, so invest in them.
Find environments where you can learn and experiment (e.g., sometimes longer drive tests can be helpful).
To increase the chances of success and minimize the chances of overlooking blindspots, leverage 3rd party perspectives and out-of-the-box thinking tools from time to time.
Reference: Kahneman, Daniel, and Jackie Snell. “Predicting a changing taste: Do people know what they will like?.” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 5, no. 3 (1992): 187-200.
