I have been reading and thinking about nudging for over four years now and the debate around it never stops to amaze me. Many of the readers of this blog will be familiar with the well-known book by Thaler and Sunstein released in 2009 and winning Richard Thaler a Nobel prize in economics later (of course the prize was given to his oeuvre not limited to just one book). The wave of behaviouralism, a branch of social sciences mostly rooted in economics and psychology that focuses on human behaviour as not just conditioned by rational thinking, has become only greater in the last years with prominent economists, psychologists and political scientists embracing it. Read More

Studying Narratives in Politics

Increasingly stories and narratives are accepted as an important subject of study in politics. Stories bring together facts, emotions, fantasies and hopes. Stories are best to stitch together different ways of knowing, from abstract science to beliefs to practical knowledge from doing things. And stories speak to our imagination; some would even argue that we cannot think beyond stories — a phenomenon Nassim Taleb called “narrativity fallacy” in his best-selling book “Black Swan”. This is basically an idea that we have to connect facts into a story that has cause-effect relationships in it. See for example the famouse Heider and Simmel experiment from social psychology. Read More