Behavioural Economics

Some of the most useful and interesting work has emerged from a field called behavioural economics. One of the parents of this field is a man called Daniel Kahneman1.

Intuition is an important notion in so much of research.

One of the trickiest things we humans have to deal with is what is called confirmation bias. Simply that we tend not to scrutinise facts that fit our beliefs and tend to rigorously examine those that contradict our beliefs. Cathy Davidson develops a related idea in her recent book, Now You See It2. She develops an argument about attention blindness or blind spots that the human brain develops as a coping mechanism for the large amount of stimuli with which it has to deal.

There is a useful report, Behavioural Economics and Public Policy from a Roundtable in 2007 conducted by Australia's Productivity Commission.

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