Commentary: Folk-Economic Beliefs: An Evolutionary Cognitive Model

Frontiers in Psychology

Tobias Otterbring¹ 

关键词: lay beliefs;    common sense;    biases;    behavioral economics;    evolutionary psychology;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01120

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

More than half a century of research has documented that people's capacity to predict the actions, attitudes, and abilities of themselves and others is quite limited (e.g., Milgram, 1963; Nisbett and Wilson, 1977; Ariely and Loewenstein, 2006; Otterbring et al., 2018). Thus, although scholars have argued that people's common sense and their roles as naïve or intuitive psychologists (Heider, 1958; Ross, 1977) are great assets for theory building, several studies have shown that lay beliefs and other intuition-based predictions “are exaggerated at best, and wholly inaccurate at worst” (Kelley, 1992, p. 6). However, despite findings that lay beliefs, self-report measures, and individuals' intuitions are both unreliable and self-contradictory, and that common sense is an inherently dangerous resource for scholars to rely upon (Fletcher, 1984), there has been a call for more research on the distinction between beliefs and behaviors, between common-sense psychology and scientific psychology (Kelley, 1992).

【 授权许可】

CC BY