We applaud Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) article on economic folk beliefs. We believe that it is crucial for the future of democracy to identify the cognitive systems through which people form their beliefs about the working of the economy. In this commentary, we put forward the idea that, although many systems are involved, fairness is probably the main driver of folk-economic beliefs.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X18000286 | DOI Listing |
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
June 2021
Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine, CA 92617
The thoughts and behaviors of financial market participants depend upon adopted cultural traits, including information signals, beliefs, strategies, and folk economic models. Financial traits compete to survive in the human population and are modified in the process of being transmitted from one agent to another. These cultural evolutionary processes shape market outcomes, which in turn feed back into the success of competing traits.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Psychol
June 2018
Department of Management, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
Behav Brain Sci
January 2018
Department of Economics, Emory University,Atlanta,GA
A main tenet of folk economics is the assumption that the world is zero-sum. Many implications stem from this assumption. These include: beliefs regarding taxation; beliefs regarding economic regulation; beliefs regarding inequality; and the core of Marxist economics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBehav Brain Sci
January 2018
ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders,Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway University of London,Egham,Surrey TW20 0EX,United
Boyer & Petersen (B&P) argue that folk-economic beliefs are widespread - shaped by evolved cognitive systems - and they offer exemplar beliefs to illustrate their thesis. In this commentary, we highlight evidence of substantial variation in one of these exemplars: beliefs about immigration. Contra claims by B&P, we argue that the balance of this evidence suggests the "folk" may actually hold positive beliefs about the economic impact of immigration.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBehav Brain Sci
January 2018
Department of Psychology, Cornell University,Ithaca,NY
We argue that existing data on folk-economic beliefs (FEBs) present challenges to Boyer & Petersen's model. Specifically, the widespread individual variation in endorsement of FEBs casts doubt on the claim that humans are evolutionarily predisposed towards particular economic beliefs. Additionally, the authors' model cannot account for the systematic covariance between certain FEBs, such as those observed in distinct political ideologies.
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