Thank you very much for persevering throughout this course and hanging out
with us. I hope you found it useful.
If you think about the overarching theme across all of the topics we covered, it's
all about experimentations. It's all about the fact that many times we
believe that we have an intuition that is correct.
We believe that we know what's driving our behavior, and we know what's driving other
people's behaviors, but often this intuition is not correct.
It's not accurate. And what we do in the experimental method
is we put these challenges to the experimental method.
We say, let's see. Let's compare this condition and the
control condition. Let's see if what we think will work
better is actually works better. And I think this is something we need to
incorporate in our daily lives to a higher degree.
I think much like the FDA, the Feder the Food and Drug Administration, forces
physicians to test their intuitions about what medications will work and not work.
I think we need similar things in the business world, in the policy world and in
our personal world, right? We make lots and lots of decisions.
Are those the right decisions? Is following your intuitions really
correct, okay? And I think that if we took this
experimental approach and said that before we make any important decision, we want to
try things out, we want to figure out empirically and not just with other
intuitions, I thinks, I think that we will make much better decisions.
And finally, I want to say that behavioral economics, and social science more
generally, is an incredibly applicable field.
Every principle we learn, every principle we discover, can have lots of
manifestations in all kinds of areas of decision making.
People get overburdened with choice. It has implications for how people choose
online and offline, what we do with health care, what we do with insurance.
If we think about the roles of emotion, it has to do with how do we give to charity
and how we think about the kids and what do we do with education.
When we think about bonuses and salaries, it has to do with the education system and
Wall Street. When we think about dishonesty, it has to
do with crime and Wall Street again. It also has to do with judges and the
legal system and so on. And I think that the real benefit for
studying social science comes from trying to apply those principles.
So if I can leave you with this one wish, it's to try and take those ideas and as
you go forward in life try to think about where you could apply them.
Try to take any particular situation and try to analyze what are the potential
forces, what are the potential. And I think that if we all do it we could
do much better. And I think that if we all do it we could
do much better.