Independent study: I am interested in supervising independent research (Psychology 299 or 399) when the student initiates the project and when I know something about it and think it is worthwhile. In addition, I am interested in finding students who want to help me with my own research program. This is not a "research assistant job." I expect each student to carry out a project from start to finish even if I play the main role in defining its objectives.
Graduate students: The same goes for prospective graduate students (for 2008). Prospective graduate students should contact me before applying.
Computer literacy requirement: My empirical work is all done on the World Wide Web using JavaScript, and R for data analysis. Students unfamiliar with command-line applications, text editors, and html are unlikely to catch up in the course of a semester.
Research assistance: I am not looking for research assistance. I don't have any work that I can "farm out" unless you are as good with computers as I am, in which case I cannot afford to pay you.
Here is a brief description of some of my own current projects, in terms of the main grants that now fund it:
Evaluation of public actions: attitudes and protected values
With Ilana RitovFunded by U.S.-Israel Bi-national Science Foundation (funding completed, but still of interest)
Extensive evidence indicates that subjective evaluations of public goods systematically violate the predictions of the economic model. The proposed research follows up on two research programs addressing the behavioral basis for some violations: one viewing judgement primarily as an expression of a spontaneously evoked reaction to a typical affected individual (Ritov and Kahneman, 1997; Kahneman, Ritov, and Schkade, 1998) and a second suggesting that evaluation is sometimes based on absolute rules (Baron and Spranca, 1997). In particular, people hold values which are protected from being traded off with any other values ('protected values').
The present research seeks to determine the role of these two modes of evaluation in propagating violations of economic principles. Specifically, we shall examine preference for complete solutions, insensitivity to quantity, and omission bias. We hypothesize that the omission bias will increase when human life, protected values, and identified (vs. statistical) cases are at issue. Quantity insensitivity and preference for complete solutions will also increase with these factors. The research is relevant to explanations of the biases at issue. The existence of moderating factors rules out a number of simple accounts.
We expect our research to integrate the above programs, and provide new insight regarding the different sources of rationality violations in evaluation of public endeavors.
Intuitions about punishment and deterrence in law: heuristics, biases, and the role of emotions
With Ilana RitovFunded by U.S.-Israel Bi-national Science Foundation
In our 1993 paper on "Intuitions about penalties and compensation," we took the law-and-economics approach as roughly normative, and we pitted this against people's intuitions. Through a combination of heuristics (e.g., preference for nature) and mis-education (e.g., failure to understand incentive and deterrent effects of tort rules), people's intuitions did not match the system very well. This raised questions about how the system is maintained if so few people understand it, about whether the law in fact conforms to economic rationality, and, if not, about whether it can.
We propose here to extend our approach to other aspects of the law, in addition to tort law. Questions about deterrence and incentive run through almost all of the law, including criminal, tort, contract, and property. A particular emphasis will be given to the role of probability throughout several domains.
The general idea also fits with our previous work on emotion. Punitiveness is surely affected by emotion. But emotion might also interact with other factors, reducing sensitivity to relevant factors like probability or deterrability, and possibly increasing sensitivity to irrelevant factors (like, arguably, the extent to which the injurer is subject to envy). In as many of the studies as possible, we shall manipulate the emotional significance of cases, looking for interactions between that significance and other manipulations. We shall also include manipulation checks, of the sort we have been using in our current research.
Because U.S. and Israeli legal systems differ someone, we can also address, in a general way, questions about the effect of the legal environment on public beliefs about the law.
Inconsistency and bias in thinking about tax reform
(with Edward McCaffery). Funded by NSF.Various heuristics and biases impede consistent, reasonable judgment about matters of tax. In particular, people may oppose or inconsistently support optimizing reforms --- or favor reforms that are less than optimal --- because of three clusters of cognitive biases. One, the well-known status-quo effect, leads people to resist change: they are apt to weigh perceived losses more than foregone gains. Two, purely formal framing manipulations affect how people perceive the advantages and disadvantages of reform proposals. Three, people underestimate or ignore various "unseen" elements of fiscal policy, such as imputed income and the incentive effects or opportunity costs of various tax and transfer programs.
We shall explore these effects in a series of experiments, some conducted on the World Wide Web and others conducted with other convenience samples or samples specifically chosen on the basis of their education or personal interests in tax issues. We shall examine these effects in a wide range of realistic tax reform proposals, e.g., those concerned with taxes on married couples, hidden taxes, payroll taxes, consumption taxes, taxes on imputed income, pollution taxes, and taxes that substitute for private expenditures (such as those that pay for health care). Finally, we shall attempt to "debias" the effects of interest, and explore the generality of training from one domain to another (in part by using samples of people who have already been trained in the economic theory of taxes).