Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [137]
5. For accounts of the power of rational choice theory to explain behavior, see Harsanyi (1969), Becker (1976), Buchanan (1989), Farmer (1992) Coleman (1993) Kiser and Hechter (1998), and Cox (1999).
6. See Freakonomics for details (Levitt and Dubner 2005). For other similar examples see Landsburg (1993 and 2007), Harford (2006), and Frank (2007).
7. Max Weber, one of the founding fathers of sociology, effectively defined rational behavior as behavior that is understandable, while James Coleman, one of the intellectual fathers of rational choice theory, wrote that “The very concept of rational action is a conception of action that is ‘understandable’ action that we need ask no more questions about” (Coleman 1986, p. 1). Finally, Goldthorpe (1998, pp. 184–85) makes the interesting point that it is not even clear how we should talk about irrational, or nonrational behavior unless we first have a conception of what it means to behave rationally; thus even if it does not explain all behavior, rational action should be accorded what he calls “privilege” over other theories of action.
8. See Berman (2009) for an economic analysis of terrorism. See Leonhardt (2009) for a discussion of incentives in the medical profession.
9. See Goldstein et al. (2008) and Thaler and Sunstein (2008) for more discussion and examples of defaults.
10. For details of the major results of the psychology literature, see Gilovich, Griffin, and Kahneman (2002) and Gigerenzer et al., (1999). For the more recently established behavioral economics see Camerer, Loewenstein, and Rabin (2003). In addition to these academic contributions, a number of popular books have been published recently that cover much of the same ground. See, for example, Gilbert (2006), Ariely (2008), Marcus (2008), and Gigerenzer (2007).
11. See North et al. (1997) for details on the wine study, Berger and Fitzsimons (2008) for the study on Gatorade, and Mandel and Johnson (2002) for the online shopping study. See Bargh et al. (1996) for other examples of priming.
12. For more details and examples of anchoring and adjustment, see Chapman and Johnson (1994), Ariely et al. (2003), and Tversky and Kahneman (1974).
13. See Griffin et al. (2005) and Bettman et al. (1998) for examples of framing effects on consumer behavior. See Payne, Bettman, and Johnson (1992) for a discussion of what they call constructive preferences, including preference reversal.
14. See Tversky and Kahneman (1974) for a discussion of “availability bias.” See Gilbert (2006) for a discussion of what he calls “presentism.” See Bargh and Chartrand (1999) and Schwarz (2004) for more on the importance of “fluency.”
15. See Nickerson (1998) for a review of confirmation bias. See Bond et al. (2007) for an example of confirmation bias in evaluating consumer products. See Marcus (2008, pp. 53–57) for a discussion of motivated reasoning versus confirmation bias. Both biases are also closely to related to the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957; Harmon-Jones and Mills 1999) according to which individuals actively seek to reconcile conflicting beliefs (“The car I just bought was more expensive than I can really afford” versus “The car I just bought is awesome”) by exposing themselves selectively to information that supports one view or discredits the other.
16. See Dennett (1984).
17. According to the philosopher Jerry Fodor (2006), the crux of the frame problem derives from the “local” nature of computation, which—at least as currently understood—takes some set of parameters and conditions as given, and then applies some sort of operation