Economic, Psychological, and Neural Creatures

" Perception and choice are the products of context dependent and comparative evaluation mechanisms that can be systematic and predictable, but that do not readily lend themselves to analyses that assume consistency, independence and invariance. "-Eldar Shafir Eldar Shafir's paper powerfully reinforces the notion that we are indeed different creatures from what much economics supposed. To cite some of Shafir's examples, people are impulsive, myopic, trusting and vindictive, often have faulty intuitions about their own motives and behaviors, exhibit biased judgment and malleable and incoherent preferences. Extending this line of reasoning a bit, perhaps we are not only fundamentally different creatures from the economics viewpoint, but perhaps we are also fundamentally different from what our common sense intuitions about ourselves supposes. That is, despite the impression that we are unitary in our decision-making – that the " me " who decided on a double latte at Starbucks last week is roughly the same " me " who decided on a grande coffee yesterday – this impression could prove to be false. Think of this as the Fundamental Attribution Error directed at ourselves. There is no a priori reason why