Since I first came across it, I have been a fan of Gerd Gigerenzer’s work. But I have always been slightly perplexed by the effort he expends framing his work in opposition to behavioural science and “nudges”. Most behavioural science aficionados who are aware of Gigerenzer’s work are fans of it, and you can appreciate behavioural science and Gigerenzer without suffering from two conflicting ideas in your mind. In a recent LSE lecture about his new book Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions (which sits unread in my reading pile), Gigerenzer again has a few swipes at Daniel Kahneman and friends.

Links this week: Detecting irrational exuberance in the brain - neuroeconomists confirm Warren Buffett’s wisdom (original article here). Spouses are more genetically similar than people chosen at random, but they are far more similar in education (ungated pdf). A well established fact, but further evidence that impatient adolescents do worse later in life. Homo Oeconomicus Versus Homo Socialis - an interesting looking conference at ETHZ.

I am reading John Coates’s thus far excellent The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind. There are many highlights and interesting pieces, the below being one of them. First, we do not see in real-time: When light hits out retina, the photons must be translated into a chemical signal, and then into an electrical signal that can be carried along nerve fibers. The electrical signal must then travel to the very back of the brain, to an area called the visual cortex, and then project forward again, along two separate pathways, one processing the identity of the objects we see, the “what” stream, as some researchers call it, and the other processing the location and motion of the objects, the “where” stream.

Links this week: Why idiots succeed. Rory Sutherland on social norms. Economics incentives versus nudge (pdf). Don’t forget that basic economic mechanisms can work. We’re related to our friends. Are there really trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk? A bash of the Myers-Briggs test. Personally, I’m a fan of the big five plus g. On g, the heritability of chimp IQ.

MIT Technology reports new research on the “wisdom of the confident”: It turns out that if a crowd offers a wide range of independent estimates, then it is more likely to be wise. But if members of the crowd are influenced in the same way, for example by each other or by some external factor, then they tend to converge on a biased estimate. In this case, the crowd is likely to be stupid.

Recently, I’ve tended to roll my eyes rather than respond to poor commentary on behaviour genetics. But areview by Kate Douglas at New Scientist, in which she pulls the behaviour genetics to eugenics to Nazi manoeuvre, has pointed out a potentially interesting book. First, from the conclusion to Douglas’s review (actually, not so much a review but a launchpad): Behaviour geneticists came to see finding high heritability as a justification for their work.

For those in or near Sydney at the end of July, there’s an interesting conference in the works - the Marketing Science Ideas Exchange. From the blurb: The Marketing Science Ideas Xchange (MSiX) is the first event of its type in Australia dedicated to the interface between behavioural science and marketing. The conference will demonstrate why behavioural sciences in general, and behavioural economics in particular, is making such strong headways into advertising.

Links this week (or closer to a month): It’s reigning men. How our convict past explains our glass ceiling. Rory Sutherland on measurebation. The genetics of investment biases (ungated version). HT: Tyler Cowen. Basically another confirmation of the three laws of behaviour genetics. Rats regret bad decisions. Matt Ridley on fat. Pulling apart the research on the destructiveness of female hurricanes - Paul Frijters and Andrew Gelman.

In April, a Conference on Genetics and Behaviour was held by the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group at the University of Chicago. The first session, with videos linked below, was on Genes and Socioeconomic Aggregates. The video and audio are average at times, and you might want to get the slides (links provided where available) as they are hard to read in the video at times. However, there are some good bits in all of the presentations.

John Coates writes: [W]e tend to view financial risk taking as a purely intellectual activity. But this view is incomplete. Risk is more than an intellectual puzzle — it is a profoundly physical experience, and it involves your body. Risk by its very nature threatens to hurt you, so when confronted by it your body and brain, under the influence of the stress response, unite as a single functioning unit. This occurs in athletes and soldiers, and it occurs as well in traders and people investing from home.