Presentation: Eldar Shafir will review some of the main insights from research into the behavioural and decision sciences and consider their implications for the design and implementation of policy. Of particular interest will be the role and importance of decision contexts, the relevance of human cognition and perception, the mindset that arises in contexts of scarcity and the tension between empirical findings and the tendency to conduct policy intuitively.
About Eldar Shafir: Shafir is the Class of 1987 Professor of Behavioral Science and Public Policy at Princeton University, the Inaugural Director of Princeton’s Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy, and co-founder and scientific director at ideas42, a social science R&D lab.
He studies cognitive science, decision-making, and behavioural economics. His recent research has focused on decision-making in contexts of poverty and on the application of behavioural research to policy. He is past president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, a member of the Russell Sage Foundation Behavioural Economics Roundtable and of the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a visiting faculty member at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford.
He was appointed by President Barack Obama to the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability, and is currently the Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Behaviour. He has received several awards, most recently a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the William James Book Award. He was named one of Foreign Policy Magazine’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2013. He recently edited a book, The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy, and co-authored the book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (2013).
He received his BA in Cognitive Science from Brown University and his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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