Skip to 0 minutes and 0 seconds Hello and welcome to the short course of Behavioural and Experimental Economics. We will have a special look at polarisation. My name is Thorsten Chmura and I’m the director for the Centre of Behavioural Sciences at Nottingham Trent University. I’m here with my colleagues. Hi, I’m Ludovica Orlandi and I’m a research fellow in the Centre for Behavioural Sciences. Hi, I’m Lerato Dixon. I’m a lecturer at Nottingham Business School and also do research for the Centre of Behavioural Sciences.
Skip to 0 minutes and 27 seconds All of us are working together in different fields and different projects so we know each other quite well and this is why we think since we like to enjoy working with each other, that you might have a little benefit from this as well, and that you might enjoy the topics. We have chosen, the topic of polarisation and of discrimination, because it’s a very interesting topic and we see this arising at the workplace in your daily lives and when countries interact with each other, when we have biases in stereotypical thinking.
Skip to 1 minute and 2 seconds The way we measure this is with behaviour economics experiments, and through the three weeks you will learn roughly some of these tests and games, how we call them, how you could apply and use them. We’re going to look at how we can apply what we have learned to study, for example, conflict within countries, particularly in particular country divides that are rooted in cultural, religious, regional and ethnic differences. As an example, the division between West and East of Germany, where the two parts of the country are characterised by cultural difference and economic differences or differences between North and South of Italy, where regional differences characterise the two areas.
Skip to 1 minute and 55 seconds Or even the differences within India, where difference in that ethnic background and in religion divides the country. We’re also going to consider regional differences. In the UK, looking at differences between Wales, England, Scotland and Ireland. We’re also going to think about the political differences that have arisen since the EU referendum and how the identity of British nationalism has come up and how we can use behavioural economics to investigate these polarised contexts as well. In addition, we can apply this to the U.S. between the Democrats and the Republicans as well. The course is structured in three weeks. In every week you will learn something different. You will read articles, you will see videos.
Skip to 2 minutes and 38 seconds In week one, we will look at rules and determinants and regulations of how to set up experiments. These rules are very important and less applied probably to the other weeks, but still you need to know them to set up your experiment in the future. In week one, after you learn about the rules and regulations in Behavioural Economics, we will also talk about trust in why trust is important, and especially during the entire course, we will look at polarisation, how different groups interact with each other and don’t interact with each other in terms of trust, fairness, reciprocity and how we can bring them to a better learning outcome and working together when they work together.
Skip to 3 minutes and 20 seconds In week two, we are going to look at the concept of fairness and in particular, we’re going to look at how it affects behaviour in bargaining games. We will study this by looking at two standards games from behavioural economics, which are a dictator game and the ultimatum game. In addition to this, in week two, we’ll also consider why cooperation is important. We’ll think about why we cooperate in different contexts, whether that be in the workplace, internationally or in your households. And we’ll use two standard games, the public goods game and the prisoner’s dilemma. So in week three, we will introduce the concept of reciprocity, which is a phenomenon where individuals tend to reciprocate.
Skip to 4 minutes and 10 seconds So respond to kind acts with kindness and the two negative actions with unkind actions. And we are going to look at how reciprocity can help us with explaining behaviour observed in the games studied in previous weeks. In particular, we are going to focus on how it can help us to explain behaviour in that the ultimatum game in public good games and in the trust game. And then to end, we think about different behavioural factors such as personality traits. We’ll think about a well used and replicable measure The Big Five personality traits and how that can impact decision making in the games that we’ve been looking at before in the previous three weeks.
Skip to 4 minutes and 57 seconds We also think about the element of social norms, the fact that what we think is the right thing to do in social settings can impact how we behave and that this can correspond to, again, the workplace and households, but also in government and policy making decisions. The entire three weeks will be closed. Then at the end of week three, of course, we hope that you will take something away that you could apply in your daily life, in your workplace. We hope that you are getting an interest in what we do and what the field of research is doing. And if you have questions or like to get in contact with us, please do this.
