Most people are aware of smoking's harmful health effects, yet many choose to light up regularly. If viewed from the lens of rational choice theory — an economic framework that suggests people always make choices that serve their best interests — the decision to smoke would be considered an irrational one. But many scholars who study human behavior find this approach of labeling individual choices problematic.
A new wave of research from psychology demonstrates multiple ways in which context can explain these “irrational” behaviors. “The hint from all of these empirical studies is that decisions which some researchers call ‘irrational’ may be highly adaptive when considered in the proper environmental context," says SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Andrew Stier.
For example, people may choose to focus only on short-term gains when they lack resources and have little control over events — two circumstances that favor the present moment and devalue the future, says SFI External Professor Luís Bettencourt (University of Chicago).
Cigarette smoking, for instance, compromises health over the long term, but can work as a short-term relaxation tool. A teenager who is financially responsible for a family is likely to choose a job over college. Similarly, someone who feels they lack agency over their life's outcomes may be less likely to invest in the future. Political turmoil, recessions, and pandemics can also push people into survival mode.
Stier and Bettencourt co-led a working group on October 20–22 with Marc Berman, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. Around a dozen researchers from the fields of psychology, complex systems, economics, sociology, and cognitive science presented their research at the three-day meeting, "Identifying General Socioeconomic and Environmental Factors Affecting Human Decision-Making and Behavior.” They took stock of a new body of evidence from experiments and observations and explore decision-making in complex environments, with a specific goal of building theories that can integrate and model context generally.
Broader discussions on the topic followed the presentations. "Part of what we want to do is try to understand as a group, whether the findings hold together, and if they do, how may we use them to create a better theory of decision making?" says Bettencourt. Doing so could help policymakers design societal interventions that enable individuals to make better decisions in key life spheres, such as health, personal finance, and education. Additionally, it will deepen SFI researchers' understanding of how context shapes behavior in complex systems.
First, the working group needed to address what the new theory could look like, Stier says. Some big questions were weighing on his mind: "Is it possible to have a general model of context? Are there commonalities to context that are useful for us to formalize with a mathematical model?" In planning the meeting, he hoped it might lead to some concrete answers.
This meeting was supported by the Emergent Political Economies Grant from the Omidyar Network to the Santa Fe Institute.