Robert H Frank Profile picture
Cornell U; author, The Economic Naturalist, Success & Luck, and Under the Influence (Jan 2020, @PrincetonUPress: https://t.co/ITZZUZRm8G
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Nov 15, 2020 10 tweets 3 min read
Holiday gatherings, the COVID-19 surge, and the sunk cost fallacy: Why you should cancel your Thanksgiving travel plans even though you’ve already purchased non-refundable air tickets. 1/ Coronavirus cases are surging out of control. In many states, hospital beds are nearly full, and health care workers are overwhelmed. And because of the 12-day lag between infections and hospitalizations, things are about to get dramatically worse. 2/
Oct 25, 2020 8 tweets 2 min read
The government says it cannot reunite the 545 children separated from their parents at the border, because it has no record of the parents' identities or whereabouts. But the parents know exactly who they are. That makes this an easy problem to solve. Step one: Send saliva samples from the children to a respected international organization--Doctors Without Borders, maybe, or The Red Cross--which would then sequence the DNA of each child.
Oct 19, 2020 19 tweets 5 min read
As psychologists say, “It’s the situation, not the person.” The strongest predictor of what people will do is what others around them do. In this thread, I’ll describe what behavioral contagion theory says about how the campaign is likely to play out during the final two weeks. First some background: During the pandemic, I’ve been participating in weekly Zoom calls with former Peace Corps Volunteers who served with me in Nepal during the late 1960s. As among so many of my other friends, there is high anxiety in this group about the election.
Jul 22, 2020 9 tweets 3 min read
As Genevieve Guenther (@DoctorVive) points out, the climate conversation has finally moved past the mindless disputes with denialists that dominated recent discussion. But we now seem stalled in the absence of a consensus about what to do next.
In the face of record wildfires and 100°F Arctic temperatures, most people now accept that we face a deadly serious challenge. Now many ask, is rapid decarbonization even feasible at any cost? And if so, is there any prospect that voters would be willing to bear that cost?
Jun 4, 2020 11 tweets 4 min read
Will General Mattis end up being Citizen B, whose willingness to speak out proves explosively contagious? In a recent thread about behavioral contagion’s role in debate, I described an example involving 10 citizens—A through J—who would oppose an authoritarian regime publicly if they thought it safe to do so. Citizen B was the pivotal figure in this example.
May 28, 2020 22 tweets 5 min read
Economic Naturalist Question #19. Why are dramatic political shifts so difficult to predict? #EconTwitter Image In an earlier thread, I explored why introductory economics courses appear to leave little lasting imprint on the millions of students who take them each year:
May 19, 2020 12 tweets 3 min read
Economic Naturalist Question #15. Why don’t top-ranked private universities charge higher tuition than many of their lower-ranked counterparts? #EconTwitter After posing this question, my former student Lonnie Fox noted that although the ratio of applications to available slots is far higher at top-ranked universities than at their lower-ranked counterparts, tuition payments vary little across schools of different rank.
Apr 25, 2020 11 tweets 2 min read
Economic Naturalist Question #2: Why do brides often spend thousands of dollars on wedding dresses they will never wear again, while grooms typically rent cheap tuxedos, even though they will have many future occasions that call for one? Jennifer Dulski, who got married six months before she took my class in 1997, posed one of my all-time favorite responses to my Economic Naturalist writing assignment.
Apr 18, 2020 8 tweets 3 min read
Yesterday I described an act of kindness directed toward my family by someone none of us had met. The gesture was not one that most of my fellow economists would have predicted. But psychologists have shown that taking such steps makes people happier. 1/
Elizabeth Dunn (@DunnHappyLab) gave one group some money and told them to spend it on somebody else. She told a second group to spend the money on themselves. Afterwards, those in the first group were significantly happier than those in the second. 2/
ted.com/talks/elizabet…
Apr 4, 2020 23 tweets 6 min read
The observations in the tweet below suggest another question: Why would the sacrifices necessary to make progress against both future pandemics and the climate crisis be much less painful than many believe? 1/ Progress against these challenges will of course require massive investment in renewable energy and similar outlays for hospital surge capacity and medical research. But experience in the current pandemic shows why these expenditures need not require painful sacrifices. 2/
Mar 25, 2020 11 tweets 5 min read
Despite broader adoption of measures to increase social distancing, COVID-19 cases are still mounting rapidly. This has prompted some to call for a return to business as usual. But new evidence shows why such calls are lethally wrongheaded. 1/ For example, analysis of real-time temperature readings from Kinsa’s smart thermometers, in use by millions of Americans scattered across the country, now makes it possible to spot local outbreaks of illness much more quickly than by using standard CDC diagnostic data. 2/
Mar 17, 2020 12 tweets 2 min read
Evidence suggests that social distancing will make the COVID-19 pandemic less severe. But distancing and other similar behavioral changes, which often entail significant personal costs, may also be advantageous in ways not widely appreciated. In this thread I’ll describe one. 1/ Most of those helped by your efforts at social distancing will of course never know that you helped them. But helping them may nonetheless benefit you in ways quite apart from reducing your odds of becoming infected by a virus that could kill you. 2/
Feb 28, 2020 25 tweets 5 min read
Thread: Why Context Is More Important than it May Seem
@PrincetonUPress
@a_f13nd
#EconTwitter Context matters in part because every human decision depends heavily on evaluative judgments, which in turn depend heavily on the contexts surrounding those judgments. Context shapes our judgments about mundane physical quantities, such as distance. 1/
Feb 15, 2020 25 tweets 7 min read
As we hear ad nauseum, we live in a time of almost unprecedented political polarization. The easiest response is to tune out, to retreat to our respective camps. But one consequence of doing that is that we make no headway on our most pressing problems. Can anything be done? 1/ Image There is actually a growing scholarly literature that speaks to this question. In the last chapter of my just-published UNDER THE INFLUENCE: PUTTING PEER PRESSURE TO WORK, I describe some of what researchers have learned. The first lesson concerns how to avoid doing harm. 2/ Image
Feb 9, 2020 15 tweets 7 min read
My UNDER THE INFLUENCE: PUTTING PEER PRESSURE TO WORK was published last week by Princeton University Press. In this thread of threads, I’ll post links to my recent threads drawn from the book.
@PrincetonUPress
@a_f13nd 1/ How contextual cues shape our responses to external stimuli:
Feb 3, 2020 25 tweets 7 min read
My UNDER THE INFLUENCE: PUTTING PEER PRESSURE TO WORK was published Jan 28 by Princeton University Press. In this thread, I’ll describe the single issue that appears to have sparked greatest interest among audiences on my current West Coast book tour. 1/
@PrincetonUPress @a_f13nd It’s the long-running controversy about “conscious consumption,” the term for voluntary individual restraint in energy usage—such as driving a hybrid car, or eating meat less often, or taking fewer plane trips. 2/
Jan 23, 2020 7 tweets 3 min read
UNDER THE INFLUENCE: PUTTING PEER PRESSURE TO WORK will be published by Princeton U Press next week. This thread contains its brief prologue, which I hope will support an informed judgment about whether the book's message is of interest.
@PrincetonUPress @a_f13nd
Jan 20, 2020 19 tweets 5 min read
My UNDER THE INFLUENCE: PUTTING PEER PRESSURE TO WORK will be published a week from tomorrow by Princeton University Press. In this thread I describe an example of how behavioral contagion distorts our spending patterns. 1/
@PrincetonUPress
@a_f13nd The example starts with a simple thought experiment: If you were society’s median earner, which of the following two worlds would you prefer? 2/
Jan 14, 2020 18 tweets 5 min read
My UNDER THE INFLUENCE: PUTTING PEER PRESSURE TO WORK will be published on January 28 by Princeton University Press. In this thread I’ll describe how contextual cues shape the ways we perceive and react to external stimuli. 1/
@PrincetonUPress @a_f13nd A central premise behind many of the claims I advance in the book is that the cognitive processes that influence our perceptions and motivations often operate completely outside of conscious awareness. 2/
Jan 13, 2020 21 tweets 5 min read
My UNDER THE INFLUENCE: PUTTING PEER PRESSURE TO WORK will be published on January 28 by Princeton University Press. In this thread, I’ll describe how behavioral contagion helped produce the rapid shift in public opinion regarding same-sex marriage. 1/
@PrincetonUPress @a_f13nd A 1989 article by Andrew Sullivan argued that the same conservative arguments traditionally offered in support of heterosexual marriage apply with equal force to same-sex marriage. At the time, legalization of same-sex marriage was widely considered a heretical position. 2/
Jan 12, 2020 25 tweets 6 min read
My UNDER THE INFLUENCE: PUTTING PEER PRESSURE TO WORK will be published on January 28 by Princeton University Press. In this thread, I’ll describe how behavioral contagion often creates powerful incentives to cheat. 1/
@PrincetonUPress @a_f13nd No one is puzzled that someone might feel resentful when she sees rule-breakers gain at her own expense. The essence of the problem is captured in THE WAITER’S DILEMMA, an illustration involving servers who receive much of their compensation in the form of cash tips. 2/