Richard Flanagan: And What Books Do You Read Mr. Gable?

Do you do what you say or do you do what you say others do?

We design a donations vs. own money choice experiment comparing three different treatments. In two of the treatments the pay-offs are hypothetical. In the first of these, a short cheap talk script was used, and subjects were required to state their own preferences in this scenario. In the second, subjects were asked to state how they believed an average student would respond to the choices. In ...

Can you believe what you read?

Love What You Do and Do What You Love

From the first day of medical school, the faculty preached an ideal concept of “balance.” It was delivered with the sympathetic belief that it would prepare my classmates and me for a field where a large amount of time would be spent working and studying. More importantly, preparing us for a field where suicide rates have been reported to be higher than the general population (1). It was during...

You Are What You Eat... Listen to, Watch, and Read

This article describes a data driven method for deriving the relationship between personality and media preferences. A qunatifiable representation of such a relationship can be leveraged for use in recommendation systems and ameliorate the “cold start” problem. Here, the data is comprised of an original collection of 1,316 Okcupid dating profiles. Of these profiles, 800 are labeled with one of ...

What Do You Think Would Make You Happier? What Do You Think You Would Choose?().

Would people choose what they think would maximize their subjective well-being (SWB)? We present survey respondents with hypothetical scenarios and elicit both choice and predicted SWB rankings of two alternatives. While choice and predicted SWB rankings usually coincide in our data, we find systematic reversals. We identify factors-such as predicted sense of purpose, control over one's life, f...