ECON 3100 UOO Psychological Research with Economic Theory Essay
Question Description
For this assignment you will listen to a podcast and answer a short quiz.
Please listen to The Happiness Lab, Season 2 Episode 4: Working Your Way to Happiness (Links to an external site.).
The Happiness Lab is a podcast by Yale University Psychologist and Professor Dr. Laurie Santos. Dr. Santos designed and teaches Yales most popular course ever, Psychology and the Good Life, which introduces students to psychology through research on well-being. If you find this research interesting, I recommend listening to the first season of the podcast or finding the Yale MOOC.
Behavioral science like that included in Dr. Santos course has made important contributions to economics through a subfield called behavioral economics, which combines psychological research with economic theory. Richard Thaler won a Nobel prize for his contributions to behavioral economics in 2017. Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer won the Nobel for their work in this area in 2019. Much of the research cited by Dr. Santos throughout her course is closely linked with economics through the behavioral subfield.
Season 2 Episode 4 of The Happiness Lab examines the motivation and rewards for market labor. The research included in this episode implicitly interrogates the assumptions of the individual choice model of labor supply that you learned over the last two modules. The goal of assigning this podcast in this module is to raise questions in your mind.
- What is rewarding about work?
- What is important to me about working life?
- How does knowing what science has to say about well-being affect my own goals and motivations?
- Have my jobs, careers, or callings reflected the findings of this research?
- Do our bosses know or care about this stuff?
- What does psychology have to offer the field of economics?
- How do assumptions about human behavior shape our economic models?
- How has understanding about the motivations of labor changed in the last 250 years?
- How can we reconcile new knowledge from psychological research with the assumptions of the individual choice model?
- What is useful about the individual choice model? How are abstractions from reality related to that usefulness?
You do not have to answer any of the above questions to complete the assignment. You only have to answer a few quiz questions that are deliberately easy to offset the additional time requirement of listening to the podcast. I hope you will think about the above questions anyway, and about any others raised by this assignment.
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