Looking for a Psychology for the Inner Rational Agent.
Research in psychology and behavioral economics shows that individuals' choices often depend on "irrelevant" contextual factors. This presents problems for normative economics, which has traditionally used preference-satisfaction as its criterion. A common response is to claim that individuals have...
| Published in: | Social Theory & Practice Vol. 41; no. 4; pp. 579 - 599 |
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| Format: | Article |
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Florida State University
Oct2015
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=109470133&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 109470133 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 0037802X STP jtl: Social Theory & Practice issn: 0037802X maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Oct2015 vid: 41 iid: 4 pid: 150 pub: Florida State University artinfo: ui: 109470133 10.5840/soctheorpract201541432 ppf: 579 ppct: 20 formats: fmt: @attributes: type: P size: 2MB tig: atl: Looking for a Psychology for the Inner Rational Agent. aug: au: Sugden, Robert affil: Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science, and School of Economics, University of East Anglia su: Psychological research Satisfaction Social theory Behavioral economics Normative economics sug: subj: Psychological research Satisfaction Social theory Research and Development in the Social Sciences and Humanities Behavioral economics Normative economics keyword: attention behavioral welfare economics inner rational agent preference purification true self attention behavioral welfare economics inner rational agent preference purification true self ab: Research in psychology and behavioral economics shows that individuals' choices often depend on "irrelevant" contextual factors. This presents problems for normative economics, which has traditionally used preference-satisfaction as its criterion. A common response is to claim that individuals have context-independent latent preferences which are "distorted" by psychological factors, and that latent preferences should be respected. This response implicitly uses a model of human action in which each human being has an "inner rational agent." I argue that this model is psychologically ungrounded. Although references to latent preferences appear in psychologically based explanations of context-dependent choice, latent preferences serve no explanatory purpose. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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