Monday, December 10, 2007

Great New Blog!

I have discovered some great blogs from reading the freakonomics blog. I discovered indexed.blogspot.com, a picture/diagram humor blog... the author and i seem to share the same sense of humor.

Today Freakonomics referenced http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com a British psychology blog which has many entries about decision making and happiness which seems to be mostly what i write about.

Saturday, December 1, 2007

Overconfidence

There is a lot of academic research in behavioral economics on how individuals tend to be overconfident. This leads people to make irrational decisions which is basically what the field of behavioral economics is all about.

One of my favorite studies is a survey was given to college students that asked them about their own chance of positive events (ex: marriage, income, career success etc) and the chance of their classmates. On average people, rate their own chances for success/happiness to be much higher than their classmates. Here is a link to an abstract of the study http://content.apa.org/journals/psp/39/5/806