KarlPurcellBehavEcon

We spent months training grad student RAs and GPT-5 mini still beat them by a lot

We have a new pre-print! 📝🖨️

We find that conversing with a disagreeing LLM helped improve people's inaccurate predictions!

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Let me tell you all about it:

Yeah no shade your way. I retweet in the same way.

Given your other posts lately on blue Monday and stuff, it was interesting to see this without the caveat of "hey this may or may not be a real thing".

But yeah realistically it's just me reading another blog post at 4am while watching the baby and getting cranky.

As I said originally, it doesn't seem crazy that there could be some small effect. But this post is not evidence for one in my view.

More thoughts: 6) no statistical tests here. 7) no time series modelling 8) effect for any actual business would be tiny!! 9) February Mondays include presidents Day in US, how is that accounted for? 10) no comparison to other holiday Mondays 11) no comparison to other Mondays for last minute PTO

I feel so many ways about this. 1) seems highly believable. 2) seems like one of those cutesy findings that with more poking into data could disappear. 3) this company only cover 34,000 very non representative companies. 4) effect size is small. 5) this company wants a splashy marketing story

Introducing “Pretend Battleship”: you’re told where all the ships are but then have to play like you never got that information. Could you do it? And what would your performance reveal about your understanding of your own mind? A joy to be part of this creative project led by @matanmazor.bsky.social

Large Language Models have shown both remarkable reasoning ability, and significant reasoning failures.

Research by @psong1.bsky.social et al has categorized this phenomenon in a clear taxonomy to explore how and why the performance is so variable:

buff.ly/hI7DYYN

Thrilled to share our latest paper, out now in Science Advances! We explored the development of cooperative behaviors — fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, & honesty —  across five societies, culturally contextualizing them & seeing how they correlate. (1/5) www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Looks very promising! Thanks for sharing it here

The Lasting Effects of Working while in School: A Long-Term Follow-Up (Forthcoming Article) - This paper provides the first experimental evidence on the long-term effects of work-study programs, leveraging a randomized lottery design from a national program in Uruguay. Participation leads to a persistent 11 percent increase in formal labor earnings seven years after the program, driven by a 4 percent increase in the monthly probability of being employed and a 6 percent increase in monthly wages. Effects are significantly larger for men, while remaining positive for women. The program is highly cost-effective, outperforming most job training programs and reaching levels comparable to early childhood investments.

Forthcoming in AER: Insights: "The Lasting Effects of Working while in School: A Long-Term Follow-Up" by Mery Ferrando, Noemí Katzkowicz, Thomas Le Barbanchon, and Diego Ubfal.

How can the use of different modes of survey data collection introduce bias? An introduction to mode effects using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) Abstract. Survey data are self-reported data collected directly from respondents by a questionnaire or an interview and are commonly used in epidemiology.

Users of survey data, lovers of DAGs, and general methodological enthusiasts, gather round!

I'm so excited to share this new paper, joint work with my brilliant colleagues @rjsilverwood.bsky.social, @pwgtennant.bsky.social, and Liam Wright.

🧵

Very important work

🥳 Stoked to share that our paper with Christina Strobel, "A Taxonomy of Al Experiments," has been accepted at the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics!

Huge thanks to Christina for collab and to the reviewers for extremely helpful feedback!

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

#EconSky

When the Effects of Informational Interventions Are Driven by Salience – Evidence from School Parents in Brazil (Forthcoming Article) - Do informational interventions work because they lead subjects to merely update beliefs in the right direction or, to a large extent, because they increase the salience of the ...

Forthcoming in AEJ: Economic Policy: "When the Effects of Informational Interventions Are Driven by Salience – Evidence from School Parents in Brazil" by Guilherme Lichand, Nina Cunha, Ricardo A. Madeira, and Eric Bettinger. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

The Poverty of Moral Foundation Messaging Prominent scholars have argued that reframing political positions and issues in terms of moral foundations that appeal to conservatives or liberals can attract more individual-level support for tho...

I need everyone in the political communications world who found the moral foundations reframing approach promising (which includes me) to read this paper

It doesn't replicate in new research. It just doesn't work.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Excited to announce that this year's Advances with Field Experiments conference will take place at the University of Chicago on September 17-18, 2026.

@johnlist.bsky.social and I will send out a call for abstracts early in the Spring.

bfi.uchicago.edu/events/event...

@katymilkman.bsky.social

Spotify limit old music so you listen to new things

The AEA has posted eight "Recent Developments" lectures exploring highly topical issues in economics, presented by the best scholars in the field:

www.aeaweb.org/conference/w...

Well worth a watch!

"Survey incentives can worsen bias! Randomized incentives help detect & account for nonresponse bias. Methods using both incentives & reminders outperform existing approaches."

New paper by Dutz, Huitfeldt, Lacouture, Mogstad, Torgovitsky & van Dijk

www.restud.com/selection-in...

#EconSky #REStud

Better artificial intelligence does not mean better models of biology Deep neural networks (DNNs) once showed increasing alignment with primate perception as they improved on vision benchmarks, raising hopes that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) would naturally ...

Published @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social with @drewlinsley.bsky.social & @tonyfeng.bsky.social: As vision models scale to human/superhuman accuracy, they’re becoming worse models of primate vision—benchmark engineering isn’t neuroscience. @carneyinstitute.bsky.social @browncopsy.bsky.social

An AI Expert Challenges an AI Skeptic, with Ethan Mollick

Had an interesting, hard interview with @adamconover.net on his podcast. I think he is a great example of a smart AI skeptic.

My main messages were that AI is a really big deal, it has good & bad impacts, and that, by sitting things out, skeptics can’t guide use. open.spotify.com/episode/5cFK...

This is a very special conference which you should absolutely consider attending if your research is at the intersection of behavioral science and AI

See you in Berlin!

Non-paywalled version:

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thrilled to announce the Handbook of Computational Social Science is officially out! 956 pages, 118 authors, and truly global, interdisciplinary perspectives. Deep thanks to the contributors and anonymous reviewers who shaped this over 4 years. Buy your copy now!
@elgarpublishing.bsky.social

Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks We propose measuring AI performance in terms of the *length* of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doub...

Post: metr.org/blog/2025-03...

There will soon be proctoring center franchises in which people will take tests, do job interviews, and complete paid surveys without access to AI.

They'll be strategically placed so that most people will live within a short distance of a proctoring center.

WTP: Epistemic, Behavioral, and Philosophical Challenges.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

🚨 Now out in Psych Science 🚨

We report an adversarial collaboration (with @donandrewmoore.bsky.social) testing whether overconfidence is genuinely a trait

The paper was led by Jabin Binnendyk & Sophia Li (who is fantastic and on the job market!) Free copy here: journals.sagepub.com/eprint/7JIYS...