Here is the intro to Don’s paper:
This essay concerns the role of economics in the interdisciplinary study of social cognition. Increasingly many economists believe that economics has such a role. Most who hold this opinion do so because they think that, to some extent, important parts of microeconomics should collapse into psychology. They think this in part because they are convinced that most human motivation has turned out to be irreducibly social, whereas traditional microeconomics depended for maintenance of its distance from psychology on modeling people as if their social relations were incidental rather than constitutive. Bruni (2005) is a representative instance of the newer view.
The perspective I will defend here agrees that economics can and should contribute to the understanding of social cognition. Economics is an important part of a complementary suite of cognitive and behavioral sciences that accomplish more together than they could do in isolation. However, I do not believe that any part of economics should be collapsed into psychology, and I reject the widespread opinion that economics for much of its history ‘went wrong’ by ignoring the social dimension of value.
I will aim to do three things in the paper. First, I will describe the origins of the widespread misperception. As will be seen, both the cognitive revolution of the 1960s and the later interanimation of cognitive science and social theory are important parts of this story (see also Angner & Loewenstein, forthcoming). Then I will explain why I think the perception is confused. Finally I will indicate why all of this matters: economics can make its distinctive and important contribution to our understanding of social cognition (and social behavior) only if it is recognized to have a different role from that of psychology. Economics is not equivalent to the psychology of valuation, though there is (of course) such a psychology, which is partly social, and economics helpfully informs it. It would reduce confusion, I believe, if much of what is now called ‘behavioral economics’ were referred to as ‘psychology of valuation’ instead.The confusions I aim to dispel are historical in origin. Thus much of the essay will be about what economists call ‘history of thought’. Let me therefore note that my motives are not the historian’s. That is, I am not concerned per se with the way in which historical thinkers represented their own intentions and views to themselves. I am instead concerned with how we should critically regard previous episodes of reasoning in light of what we think we have learned that participants in these past episodes did not know. To illustrate with a simple example: the question ‘Why did Copernicus set the scientific revolution in motion?’ is not a question for the intellectual biographer, because Copernicus never imagined he was doing any such thing; but it is a perfectly good question for the historian of science who knows how events turned out and what led to what.
manwithoutqualities 