Lee Sigelman writes,

In a brief article (abstract here) in the current issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, Dan Ariely and Michael Norton analyze the wide gap currently separating psychologically- and economically-based experimental research — a gap clearly perceptible in experimental work within political science, a heavy borrower from both psychology and economics.

“Psychologists have not traditionally been interested in the efficiencies and design of markets,” Ariely and Norton note, “while experimental economists have not customarily focused on emotion, memory, or implicit cognition.”

In addition to studying different topics, the two fields differ in their research methods as well:

It’s not just that psychologists enjoy lying to people while economists enjoy paying them. To find out what they want to find out, psychologists have to give their experimental subjects a “cover story” and transport them into a particular situation, for which purposes deception is often necessary. By contrast, economists want to know about experimental subjects’ ability to make informed decisions, and for that purpose deception would be counterproductive. At the same time, economists want to motivate their subjects to behave “normally,” so they explicitly define incentives to enable subjects to evaluate the costs and benefits of a particular course of action.

Finally, Sigelman quotes Ariely and Norton, who write,

Experimental economists might shift from asking whether deception is good or bad — a moral question — to exploring whether deception helps or harms social scientists’ ability to understand human behavior. Psychologists’ aversion to incentives, on the other hand, might be addressed by taking a broader view of what experimental economists are trying to accomplish with them: making people care about their behavior as much in the lab as they do in the real world.

Aversion to incentives?

I just have two things to add.

1. I applaud the call for researchers to become more aware of what is being done in other fields, but at some point, different people have different areas of expertise. (See my remarks here on why we shouldn’t be disturbed that economists don’t spend more time studying romance and here on different views of rationality.)

2. I question whether psychologists really have an “aversion to incentives.” Giving incentives to research participants is one strategy out of many. It’s natural for economists to privilege financial incentives–that’s what they study–but maybe not so natural for others and maybe not always so relevant to the “real world.” Many important real-world phenomena–such as political particpation–have little or no financial incentives at all!