Powered by Blogger.
Home » Archives for 2015

PhD Studentships

Posted by Economist Channel on Monday, December 28, 2015 Label:
Below are details of some studentship opportunities. The three Stirling ones are open to potential supervisors to apply for and if you are currently speaking to a supervisor here or about to get in touch they are worth asking about. The key mechanism to apply for funding from the student perspective is through the ESRC. Details of ESRC PhD studentship funding is available on the following website. Please read carefully the rules about eligibility. If you are interested in applying for funding to work with us feel free to get in touch. The second scheme below may be of interest to potential non-academic partners.

University of Stirling Research Studentships
The University of Stirling Research Studentships will support outstanding novel  research projects that can demonstrate a link to the Universities strategic priorities. The University will provide the costs of a three year PhD, fees at Home/EU rate, and the standard stipend and research expenses (at RCUK rates).

University of Stirling Collaborative Research Studentships
The University of Stirling Collaborative Research Studentships will support cutting edge research projects which are delivered in collaboration with companies, focused on developing innovative solutions to business challenges, and provide research experience in academic and business environments.  Each scholarship will provide funding for tuition fees, a stipend to cover living expenses, and research costs for a four year PhD project.  The University will fund the cost of fees (Home/EU rate) and the standard stipend (RCUK rates).  The company partner will provide minimum funding of £7,000 per annum of which £3,000 will be used to enhance the student’s stipend, £1,000 to provide a programme of research and business skills training, and £3,000 towards the research costs of the project.Projects must be developed jointly between the company and the relevant Academic School(s) in order to ensure that they are focused on a clear business problem or research challenge.  Supervision will be provided by an academic supervisor and an industrial supervisor from the company partner.  The student will be based in the University, but the company is expected to provide a placement at its premises of between 6 and 18 months duration.  The arrangements for the placement can be flexible as appropriate to the needs of the project, but must form a substantial part of the research environment and training.

University of Stirling International Research Studentships
The former Overseas Research Scholarship Award Schemes (ORSAS) operated by the UK and Scottish Governments were highly successful in attracting excellent international candidates to doctoral study and the University benefitted from a number of awards under the scheme.  ORSAS provided funding to meet the difference between Home/EU and Overseas Tuition Fee rates, thereby attracting international students of the calibre necessary to secure significant funding from governmental and other organisations in their home countries. The University of Stirling International Research Studentship scheme will support outstanding international (non-EU) students to undertake PhD research within the University.  The Studentships will meet the cost of the difference between Home/EU and Overseas Tuition Fees.

Links 22/12/2015 and Update on Stirling Behavioural Science Centre

Posted by Economist Channel on Tuesday, December 22, 2015 Label:
Thanks for reading over the year. Has not been the most active year on the blog partly due to things being very active in the research group. Look forward to posting more regularly throughout the next few months. As always open to suggestions. In terms of the research group, we are now a core group of 18 researchers ranging from PhD student to Professor organised around a weekly research meeting and seminar and a range of internal and external collaborations as well as a teaching programme and a sporadic internship scheme. We have an active programme of events planned throughout the first half of 2016 culminating in our second annual PhD conference and behavioural science workshop in June. Professor David Laibson has agreed to keynote this event and we will issue a call for PhD papers early in 2016. The June 2015 event was very successful and we look forward to bringing people to Stirling again. We are also continuing a range of internal and externally-funded projects and we are currently also recruiting onto our MSc programme for 2016/2017. We are also happy to talk to prospective PhD candidates in this area and the best indication of whether you would be interested in working here is to look at our publications page and see if this work is what interests you. We will also launch more external partnership projects in 2016 and are very open to collaboration with non-academic bodies on behavioural science projects. Thanks to the many readers who have supported the development of this research centre in countless ways and we look forward to continuing things in 2016.

1. Alex Tabarrok's post on Roland Fryer's seminar on education, inequality and incentives and the seminar itself are really worth looking at.

2. Ed Diener responds to the Million Women Study paper on well-being and mortality. Debate well worth following.

3. PNAS paper on the use of prediction markets to predict the replicability of scientific studies.

4. UK government review of REF and research funding 

5. BMJ paper on the health penalty to getting elected to high political office

6. Striking work by Mokyr & UCD's Cormac O'Grada & Morgan Kelly on role of nutrition/health in UK industrial revolution

7. On the quantity-quality trade-off for public policy trials. Very interesting blogpost by Chris Blattman

8. Lancet paper by Wykes and several others on research priorities for mental health in Europe

The Works of Dr. Sander van der Linden.

Posted by Economist Channel on Wednesday, December 16, 2015 Label:
Readers might be interested to hear how Behavioural Science applies to a topical issue such as climate change. With COP21 now over, society must now ponder how it might reach those aims set out. Professor Tania Lombrozo (UC Berkeley) highlighted on National Public Radio How Psychology Can Save The World from Climate Change. 

In this article the new paper by Dr. Sander van der Linden (Princeton) is referred to. Dr. Sander van der Linden’s extensive work on this topic has made significant impact.

Bio:

PhD 2010 -2014. London School of Economics. Including two years with Yale Project on Climate Change Communication Lab.

2014-Present: Principal Investigator, Social and Environmental Decision Making Lab, Princeton.

23 Publications 2010-2015.

Seminal Climate Change Behavioural Science Papers 2014-2015.

1. van der Linden, S. (2014). On the relationship between personal experience, affect and risk perception: The case of climate change. European Journal of Social Psychology, 44(5), 430-440.

This paper addresses the aspects of affect and risk as a dual process cognition when considering climate change. It then uses Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to assess the recursive (unidirectional) and non-recursive (bi-directional) relationships between these processes. Two instrumental variables of personal experience for risk and knowledge about the causes of climate change for affect are identified for further analysis.

2. van der Linden, S. (2015). The social-psychological determinants of climate change risk perceptions: towards a comprehensive model. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 41, 112-124.

This paper considers the multidimensional social-psychological determinants of climate change risk perceptions. The components of a Climate Change Risk Perception Model containing cognitive, experiential, socio-cultural and socio-demographic factors accounted for 68% of the variance. Climate change risk perceptions were also analysed as a two dimensional construct of both personal and societal level risk judgements. Indices for global/societal risk, personal risk and holistic risk perception were considered.

3. van der Linden, S., Leiserowitz, A. A., Feinberg, G. D., & Maibach, E. W. (2015). The scientific consensus on climate change as a gateway belief: Experimental evidence. PloS one, 10(2), e0118489.

This paper provided experimental evidence for a gateway belief model of climate change consensus messaging. By considering the cascade effect (availability cascade) of increasing public understanding of climate change and resultant discourse, it is hoped support for societal action can be increased. However using a Full Information Maximum Likelihood procedure to model a gateway belief found a two-step cascading effect. First the effect of consensus messaging on climate change is fully mediated by the perceived level of scientific agreement. Second the belief in scientific consensus functions as a ‘gateway’ to beliefs about climate change and onto support for action.

4. van der Linden, S. (2015). Intrinsic motivation and pro-environmental behaviour. Nature Climate Change, 5(7), 612-613.

This paper looks at the factors of extrinsic and extrinsic motivations for pro-environmental behaviour. The challenge of maintaining treatment effects over time (commitment and self-control) is highlighted as a possible weakness of extrinsic motivation. However the effects of intrinsic motivational factors like ‘warm glow’ and ‘helpers high’ is likely to outlive the extrinsic motivation of incentives.

5. van der Linden, S., Maibach, E., & Leiserowitz, A. (2015). Improving public engagement with climate change five “best practice” insights from psychological science. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(6), 758-763.

This paper reflects that people tend to regard climate change as a non-urgent and psychologically distant risk – spatially, temporally and socially. Analysis is given that climate change policymaking has primarily revolved around technical solutions or standard economic models. However insights from psychological science can help improve policy making. System 1 and 2 thinking as well as time discounting and judgement under uncertainty is considered in relation to the abstract and distant presentation of climate change. The role of risk aversion, personal experience, personal efficacy, collective efficacy as well as descriptive and prescriptive social norms, are also highlighted as components of climate change risk perception.

December 12th Links

Posted by Economist Channel on Saturday, December 12, 2015 Label:
1. Does happiness itself directly affect mortality? The prospective UK Million Women Study. Lancet 2015

2. Angus Deaton Nobel Lecture on "Measuring and understanding behavior, welfare, and poverty"

3. More positions available at the Behavioural Insights Team

4. Very interesting Andy Haldane speech on the future of the labour market

5. Why the NHS needs more behavioural insights

6. Article on Sweden's "Minister for the Future"

7. Nature piece on the potential for prediction markets in hinting at the reliability of scientific information  

8. Chris Blattman blogpost on the quantity-quality trade off in field experiments

9. "The Nature and Predictive Power of Preferences: Global Evidence".  Survey data from 80000 people in 76 countries.

Deaton Nobel Lecture: Measuring & understanding behavior, welfare, & poverty

Posted by Economist Channel on Thursday, December 10, 2015 Label:





Summary of the Workshop on the Behavioural Science of Self-Control

Posted by Economist Channel on Saturday, December 5, 2015 Label:


Thanks everybody for attending our SIRE workshop on the "Behavioural Science of Self-Control" on Friday December 4th! We had fantastic presentations from world-leading economic and psychological self-control researchers and engaged in extremely interesting discussions about how economics and psychology can interact and benefit from each other.

For aims and scope of the workshop have a look here.

Some more subjective information about the talks and pictures are below (thanks Jodie Quigley for taking excellent notes and Craig Anderson for taking pictures). Details of future workshops can be found here and by following our twitter account.

 
Presentations

Leonhard Lades on Present Bias and Everyday Self-Control Failures: A Day Reconstruction Study (with Liam Delaney)

After welcoming the workshop participants to Stirling and introducing the topic of the day, Leonhard talked about a paper co-authored with Liam Delaney that aims to compare and integrate economic and psychological approaches to self-control. The study's methodological innovation is the use of the Day Reconstruction Method in order to measure temptation and self-control as it occurs in everyday life. The main results of the paper are that economic measures of present bias do not predict everyday temptations and everyday self-control, but psychological measures of trait temptation and trait self-control do.

The working paper can be found here.


Kirsten Rohde on Measuring Decreasing Impatience

Kirsten presented a novel measure of decreasing impatience called the DI index as an economic measure for dynamic inconsistencies underlying self-control failures. Main advantages of the index are that it provides information about individual differences in changing impatience without relying on (i) assumptions about utility and the curvature of the utility function and (ii) degrees (not changes) of impatience. This is particularly relevant in domains where utility functions are far from linear or difficult to measure. We discussed interesting applications of the index to measure decreasing impatience in non-monetary domains such as health.

The working paper can be found here.

 
Siegfried Dewitte on Behavioral Vaccination and Paling Temptations
 
Siegfried suggested that there are three different means by which self-control failures can be avoided: (i) increasing self-control, (ii) removing temptation, or (iii) paling temptations. He presented his research on paling temptations in order to reduce their effect on behaviour. In several studies he and co-authors showed that pre-exposing study participants to tempting stimuli can reduce consumption of the tempting goods some time later. He suggested three different mechanisms that might explain this paling effect (habituation, cognitive dissonance, and cognitive control) and showed evidence that is consistent with cognitive control but not with the other two mechanisms. We discussed opportunities to apply the insights in the real world, for example in nudge-type interventions.

Many of the papers Siegfried referred to can be found here.

Michael Daly on Self-Control, Time Preferences, and Health and Well-Being Across the Lifespan

Michael presented a summary of his recent Future Leader work on childhood self-control predicting economic success, health behaviour, health, and subjective well-being. He made the point that self-control is strongly related to many important economic and psychological life outcomes which warrants the attention devoted to self-control in behavioural science. He focused on his work using two large scale British Cohort Studies (BCS and NCDS) and showed in several pathway analyses why childhood self-control predicts economic outcomes and health. For example, individuals with low childhood self-control are 14 percentage points more likely to smoke in later life than individuals with high childhood self-control. In order to organise his various insights, he discussed his thoughts on building a lifespan model of the effects of self-control throughout life. 
Michael's Future Leaders project can be found here. 

 
Charlie Sprenger Judging Experimental Evidence on Dynamic Inconsistency

Charlie presented his view on how economic designs that elicit dynamically inconsistent choices changed in the last 5 years and might change in the future. In order to improve the measurement of dynamic inconsistencies he suggested to be aware of various confounding factors such as arbitrage opportunities, background consumption, payment reliability, and transaction costs. He highlighted that longitudinal designs should be used to really measure dynamic inconsistencies instead of measuring hallmarks of it. He suggested to more often use non-monetary rewards to elicit dynamic inconsistencies – without claiming that monetary discounting paradigms are useless. He focused on the demand for commitment which is the economically most relevant aspect of dynamically inconsistent preferences. As an example of a measurement of dynamic inconsistency in the domain of food with a potential for self-commitment, he presented some recent findings from a consumption study in a “food desert”. 

Charlie's homepage can be found here. 


Wilhelm Hofmann "On Integrating the Components of Self-Control"
 
Wilhelm presented key findings from the Everyday Temptation Study to motivate the conceptual framework he suggested afterwards. In the conceptual framework he organised various psychological processes that induce or prevent self-control failures, and showed how they might interact with enactment constraints in the individuals’ environments. For each of the components of self-control, he presented determinants of self-control failure and potential avenues for intervention. The framework suggests, for example, to differentiate between interventions that reduce (the strength of) temptations and interventions that increase the motivation and ability to use self-control in the face of temptations. He highlighted that self-control is not a unitary phenomenom, but that there are many routes to self-control failure and success and hence many soft spots for intervention. 

Wilhelm's publication page is here. 




Discussion


The final discussion dealt with various important topics related to self-control research, some of it on the edge of economics and psychology. It was mentioned that a stronger focus on similarities of (rather than differences between) the economics and the psychology of self-control would be beneficial in order to communicate effectively across disciplines. As one of the key problems for self-control research in the future as well as potential policy interventions, we identified the potential for preferences to change over time. If preferences change independent of self-control failures, it feels uncomfortable to some panel members to push people to make certain decisions, for example by enacting constraints on them. If, however, the constraints are put in place by the individuals themselves – in the sense of commitment devices – less ethical problems were mentioned. We discussed whether self-control is unambiguously good and how the existence of self-control failures can provide a reason for paternalistic policy intervention. Also the inherent value of being able to make autonomous, unconstrained decision was discussed in relation to commitment devices. A repeating theme was the difference between resisting temptations and avoiding temptations, for example by using commitment devices. A related blog post can be found here. 





The Court Room was packed and discussions did not stop during coffee and lunch breaks.








Copyright © 2014 Economist Channel. All rights reserved. New Super Seo modified by CB Blogger. Powered by Blogger