Bounty hunters keep invasive species in check

At least for now another successful case where the Public are invited to join the force to control invasive species, reported Nature. 

Another successful example I saw recently was how community participation and adaptive management turned back the tide of American mink invasion in Scotland. 

Of course such a strategy does not always work, and the same article mentioned a couple of examples: pythons in Florida and red foxes in Australia.  The pythons proved tough to catch because they were hard to spot in the Florida brush, and the removal of 1/5 of Victoria red foxes ended up boosting the population because the survivors thrived when they had less competition. 

Here is a recent paper reviewing such public-involved harvest programs.

Gamification: opportunities and challenges

"The structures and procedures that game designers have developed can be applied just as well to the work place and social impact situations such as global warming or environmental sustainability."

Similarly Werbach, co-author of the recently released book For The Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business, says successful gamification needs “to use a thoughtful design process, map out the objectives” understand the players and then pick the most appropriate elements from games to achieve the desired goal. Effective examples, he says, provide users with real-time feedback, clear, achievable goals, narratives that they care about and challenging but achievable tasks.

Two major concerns about gamification are: addiction of course, and its oversimplified reward scheme.  The central tenets of gamification, that is, rewards immediately improve performance or engagement has been criticized by psychologists on the ground of  overjustification effect.  Try to motivate someone with external rewards can undermine their pure enjoyment of doing something (full article).

HT: M. Cole.

Dissonance

“But when we researched the data the whole idea of dissonance came into focus. People were doing something very different from the things they said they wanted on their profile."

“We are so focused on behaviour rather than stated preferences because we find people break from their stated preferences so often (lessons revealed from March.com story).”

Friday post: The framing trap

A young pries asked his bishop, "May I smoke while praying?"
The answer was an emphatic "No!"
Later, encountering an older priest puffing on a cigarette while praying, the younger priest scolded, "You shouldn't be smoking while praying! I asked the bishop, and he said I couldn't."
"That's strange," the older priest replied. " I asked the bishop if I could pray while I'm smoking, and he told me that it was okay to pray at any time."

As this old joke shows, the way you ask a question can profoundly influence the answer you get. The same is true in decision making, If you frame your problem poorly, you're unlikely to make a smart choice.

--from Page 200 of Smart Choices by Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa. 1999 Harvard Busincess School Press.

As-if behavioural economics: neoclassical economics in disguise?

A recent paper claims that behavioral economics don't travel far enough from neoclassical models.

As Tom Harford put it,

"Consider the human response to risk. Neoclassical economics says that we act as if considering all possible outcomes, figuring out the probability and utility of each outcome, multiplying the probabilities with the utilities, and maximising expected utility. Clearly we do not in fact do this – nor do we act as if we do.

Behavioural economics offers prospect theory instead, which gives more weight to losses than gains and provides a better fit for the choices observed in the laboratory. But, say Berg and Gigerenzer, it is even more unrealistic as a description of the decision-making progress, because it still requires weighing up every possible outcome, but then deploys even harder sums to produce a decision. It may describe what we choose, but not how we choose.

Gigerenzer prefers to look for actual decision processes. Take the simple act of catching a ball in flight. The spirit of neoclassical economics would say that people act “as if” swiftly calculating the parabolic arc of the ball. The spirit of behavioural economics would explain dropped catches with references to some systematic errors in the way we perform that calculation. But in fact, ball-catchers use a cognitive shortcut called the “gaze heuristic”, running forward and back while keeping constant the angle of sight up to the ball as it descends. No amount of “nudging” towards faster differential calculus will help prevent dropped catches.

This is tough on behavioural economists, because in order to be taken seriously by other economists they have had to play the optimising game. Switching to Gigerenzer’s rules would mean the end of economics as we know it.

Yet the critique is sobering. If behavioural economists do not really understand why we do what we do, there are surely limits and dangers to the project of nudging us to do it better."

A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind

From the latest Science.

"We developed a smartphone technology to sample people’s ongoing thoughts, feelings, and actions and found (i) that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is and (ii) found that doing so typically makes them unhappy. "

Lessons learned: 1) try to stay focused, and 2) write down what is in mind when finding myself mind-wandering and come back to it later.

Friday post: New ecosystem service--Tarantulas Help Scientists Break Down Human Fear

"The scientists also asked volunteers beforehand how scared they thought they might be of the tarantula, and found that those who thought they would be most scared had a false impression afterwards of how large the spider was.

The scientists think it may be this so-called "expectation error" that could be the key to people developing a phobia -- an irrational, intense and persistent fear of certain things, people, animals or situations (more)."

The unconscious will

We are capable of working towards a goal even before we realize the existence of that goal, according to a review paper in the latest Science.

When crowds panic

the group as a whole becomes subject to a collective crowd stamped, and people die (more). I am more thinking of this in a broader sense, of course. Do we make a bad collective decision when the society as a whole gets panic, say, in the case of UK FMD or Iraq war?

Too many WEIRD subjects and too few non-WEIRD researchers

The problem of behavioral science (more).

Most experimental subjects (e.g.undergrads) in the behavioral sciences are WEIRD - Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic - and thus weird - not representative of most human beings.

Becareful whom you nudge

Energy conservation nudges work with liberals, they backfire with conservatives (link).

"When it comes to making ethical decisons...

...human rationality isn't a scientist, it's a lawyer. This inner attorney gathers bits of evidence, post hot justifications, and pithy rhetoric in order to make the automatic reaction seem reasonable. But this reasonableness is just a facade, an elaborate self-delusion. "

From page 167 of The decisive moment by Johah Lehrer, 2009. Text Publishing Melbourne Australia

Pyramid incentive scheme

Explains how a MIT team found 10 red balloons across the US in less than nine hours (Marginal revolution)!

The fun theory

A positive way to nudge.

"This site is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people's behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it's change for the better."

HT: Rafi Stern.

Psychology and Global Climate Change

A report by the American Psychological Association

Why people may change their mind without new information?!

"The observation that motion energy supports both the initial and final choices provides evidence against two main alternatives to post-initiation processing: (1) change of decision based on recall and/or reconsideration of evidence acquired before initiation¹⁸, and (2) correction of an initial motor error perhaps due to confusion about the stimulus–response mapping¹². The analysis instead supports a non-decision time in which information from the stimulus arrives too late to affect an initial decision but is present to refine it after the brain has committed to a particular response and action(Nature)."

Agent-based economic models

is the new fashion, according to papers in the latest Nature.

"Agent-based models are not a panacea. The major challenge lies in specifying how the agents behave and, in particular, in choosing the rules they use to make decisions. In many cases this is still done by common sense and guesswork, which is only sometimes sufficient to mimic real behaviour."

Friday quote: what scientists know

"Scientists will know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing, or will know less and less about more and more until they know nothing about everything (Freakonomics)."

Can our ancient brain deal with modern risks?

and why we are much more responsive to a snake than climate change.

HT: Nate Hagens via GIEE list.

Hawthorne effect or coincidence?

A double check of the original data set failed to demonstrate the Hawthorne effect (Freakonomics).