An article written by the 2022 JRP Internship Team, comprised both of JRP students, as well as students from Columbia University’s Globes programme, has just been published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (IF: 29.3) as a commentary to Nick Chater and George Loewenstein’s article titled The i-frame and the s-frame: How focusing on individual-level solutions has led behavioral public policy astray.
The article touches on the topic of addressing both the individual and systemic frameworks as a method to solving the issues regarding income inequality. The main idea of the article revolves around individuals known as “positive deviants”, and explores the patterns in their financial behaviors during times of potential financial hardship, such as the COVID19 pandemic, as well as the system limitations which those individuals navigate. It also tackles the possible limitations for the emergence of positive deviants in the society, such as gender inequality.
The commentary format (Open Peer Commentary) in which the article is published allows for academics to write their own articles and responses to published texts and later gives the authors a chance to respond to them. The Chater and Loewenstein article has had comments from scholars such as a Nobel Prize Laureate Richard H. Thaler (The University of Chicago Booth School of Business), Cass R. Sunstein (Harvard Law School) and Ralph Hertwig (Max Planck Institute for Human Development), all of whom are known experts in the field of behavioral policy and implementation of behavioral science theories. Links to the article (as well as its preprint version) can be found below.
The commentary can be found on the journal’s website
A free, pdf version, which includes the main article, other commentaries and the authors’ response.