Journal 24 -- April 30 Post

In a response to two of my previous journal posts, Mrs. Gergen linked this article: https://som.yale.edu/blog/the-behavioral-science-of-covid-19

I just finished reading it and I have to say, it is a fantastic read. I wanted to make connections with Behavioral Economics and the COVID-19 crisis and I did some research, but I didn’t find much on my own.

Here, I really like how the author wrote “ease and convenience dominate behavior.” That couldn’t be ever more true based on what we’ve seen with Kahneman’s System 1 and 2. As a result, this leads to people buying more hand sanitizer than soap because it’s more convenient, then they post-hoc justify that it must be safer/more effective than using soap, which is scientifically wrong.

Sort of tying this to Bott’s response, but how can we then “package” the ideas of BE such that people can learn from them? This is an extremely challenging question I’m sure I’m not qualified enough to properly answer but I think it would definitely have to do with aligning incentives: we have to give people options that they clearly want, and be able to explain in simple terms why such a decision makes sense (if necessary). So from the previous example, we’d have to portray soap in such a way that incentives people to pick it, i.e., more effectively trigger their System 1s in a beneficial way.