Contributions of Behavior Analysis to Behavioral Economics.
Behavior analysis hands you the tools to swap mentalistic economic labels for measurable, changeable contingencies.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Frølich and colleagues wrote a think-piece. They asked: what can behavior analysis give to behavioral economics?
They reviewed popular “irrational choice” claims. Then they showed how operant tools—reinforcer rate, delay, motivating operations—can test and change those choices.
No new data were collected. The paper is a roadmap for turning mentalistic labels into environmental variables you can measure and manipulate.
What they found
The authors found that behavioral economics is stuck describing quirks. Behavior analysis offers the technology to explain and fix them.
Example: calling a choice “present-bias” is a label. Measuring how delay to reward changes response rate is an experiment you can run today.
How this fits with other research
Rachlin (1995) already argued we can unify economic quirks under value maximization. Furrebøe et al. (2017) agree but add the hardware: single-subject designs, reinforcer assessments, and contingency maps that let you actually do it.
Larsen et al. (2017) give a live demo. They tracked real shoppers with video analytics and a four-term contingency lens—exactly the technology Frølich wants behavioral economists to adopt.
Morris et al. (1982) and Barrett (2016) beat the same drum: skip mental words. The 2017 paper extends their anti-cognitivist stance into the economics aisle.
Why it matters
Next time you hear “that client is impulsive,” stop. Translate the label into a delay-discount curve, run a brief reinforcer assessment, and adjust the contingency. You just turned a fuzzy economic story into a testable behavior plan.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This article discusses behavior analysis' contribution to behavioral economics. Nobel Laureate Award winner Herbert Simon described the science of economics in an evolutionary context in A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice. Without claiming any relation between the two publications, it was published two years after B.F. Skinner's Science and Human Behavior. While popular behavioral economics continues the critique of Homo Economicus, the eagerness to prove that man is not rational carries the risk of substituting one mentalistic explanation for another. Behavior analysis may contribute to developing knowledge about behavioral economics and consumer behavior. The selectionist perspective, the generic principle of reinforcement, and single-subject research are its main contributions. The conceptual framework of behavior analysis enables investigation of the selection of functional relations between human choice behavior and its environmental contingencies. The circumstance-specific research methods of behavior analysis and the possibility to extend them into large-scale analysis provide the means to explain the psychological underpinnings of behavior. Behavior economics offers good descriptions of important phenomena, and behavior analysis contributes with the technology to explain and influence them.
The Behavior analyst, 2017 · doi:10.1007/BF03391887