Backhanded Compliments
April 19th, 2007
Those of us in experimental psychology often feel misunderstood. Witness the backhanded compliment paid to psychologists in an otherwise fascinating article by Bill Mckibben in the March issue of Mother Jones.
“Reversal of Fortune” is an article about the importance of creating more realistic models of human behavior in economics–about how too many material goods can actually result in unhappiness. The author introduces the work of Nobel prize winning psychologist, Dr. Daniel Kahneman. Dr. Kahneman conducted groundbreaking research into decision making that showed how irrational people can be in their choices. The article goes on to explain how rigorously those experiments were controlled.
Then the backhanded compliment:
If you are worried that there might be something altogether too airy about this, be reassured—Kahneman thinks like an economist.
Apparently, the discussion of methodological rigor was supposed to “reassure” us that Dr. Kahneman “thinks like an economist” and is not spewing those “altogether too airy” theories that psychologists are presumed to entertain. Never mind that Mr. Mckibben’s whole point is that happiness is a real, measurable construct that economists don’t understand.
After all, Dr. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics precisely because he introduced a hundred years of experimental psychology to a field that was infested with altogether too many airy, unexamined models of humans behaving like clones of Adam Smith (incidentally, another hero of mine).
I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Dr. Kahneman discuss his research in person, and cringed at seeing him tarred with the same cigar as Freud by people who can’t tell the difference.