Could someone please send me a photo (that I’d have permission to share on this blog) that connects a cat to “heuristics and biases” or “behavioral economics”? Thanks.
P.S. Javier Benítez points us to this page of free stock photos of cats. Cool! Still, if anyone has anything particularly appropriate to the topic above, just let me know. Thanks again.
Ask Richard Posner Andrew. You two share this interest. You are so funny. Quirky, I like this blog for that reason.
Please don’t make a habit of linking pages of stock cat photos. They are the greatest threat to my productivity.
I wonder what we’ll see. A cat reading Kahneman? A cat looking at something at the bottom of a swimming pool? (“Cat considers whether to write that off as a sunk cost”).
So many options…
Human opening can as cat supervises? No, that’s straight Pavlovian conditioning by the cat.
How about a cat nudging something?
https://typeset-beta.imgix.net/lovelace/uploads/18/bd9e78b0-c034-0132-9a5c-0e01949ad350.gif
Looks great to me! Especially when presented in such a Sisyphean* manner. Reminds me of the old joke, “Blessed are they who go around in circles, for they shall be known as Big Wheels.”
*That’s one of the hardest-to-spell words I’ve ever encountered.
A cat with an anchor?
No picture, but this could maybe help anyway. There is a paper on something called the Hot Stove Effect (here: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/orsc.12.5.523.10092) which is a bias implied by certain learning models that leads to the selection less risky alternatives. It is motivated by a quote by Mark Twain about how cats that sat on a hot stove once will never sit on another stove (whether hot or cold) again.
What a great cause! Combining two of my main interest – research and cats!
Bradshaw, John (2013) Cat Sense
http://catsensebook.com/
Cats and research on cats. Excellent read.
A follow-up by Bradshaw & Ellis, Sarah, The Trainable Cat: A Practical Guide to Making Life Happier for You and Your Cat is a fascinating discussion on applied behavioural analysis with a cat. Yes, you can train a cat. You just have to remember that they are solitary animals and don’t need the approval of others the way pack animals like dogs or humans do.
One fascinating snippet: Cats know their names (with a bit of time) but just calling the cat’s name does not mean it will come running. Calling the name just gets its attention. Something like, “Felix, come” makes sense to the cat.
I’m pretty sure the guys at http://econlolcats.tumblr.com/ will be happy to share their stuff!
Peer remew seems to have done a good job on these.