Behavioral Whatever

I’m going to start a new discipline called behavioral physics. Unlike traditional physics, which assumes that objects just fly apart from each other, behavioral physicists recognize that a phenomenon they call “gravity,” prevents this from happening.  Or maybe I will create behavioral evolutionary biology based upon the concept of natural selection, rather than the assumption that everything just stays the same, which traditional evolutionary biologists rely on. The way a physicist or biologist would feel reading those sentences is the way that I feel most of the times I read about behavioral economics.

The latest irritation is an article from the New York Times about getting doctors to stop over-prescribing antibiotics. Getting doctors to stop over-prescribing antibiotics is a good thing. Personally, I worry more about the negative consequences of overuse of antibiotics than I do about the negative consequences of the overuse of painkillers. On the other hand, their suggestion that they are able to solve this problem because behavioral economics has remedied the flaws of traditional economics is nonsense.

They describe how various attempts to get doctors to stop prescribing unnecessary antibiotics have failed because they “are all based on the assumption that physicians are rational agents who will do the right thing if provided proper information and incentives. But,” they ask, “what if doctors are a little irrational, like the rest of us? They may over-prescribe antibiotics out of an unrealistic fear that the patient could eventually develop complications and need them, or because it is easier than arguing with a patient who insists on getting them.” The situation they just described is practically a definition of a rational choice. Prescribing the antibiotic has a benefit for the doctor (the patient is happy) and no cost to the doctor. 

Nevertheless, they go on to explain that “Over the last few years, our research team has developed several new approaches to reducing unnecessary antibiotic prescribing, drawing on insights from behavioral economics and social psychology. These disciplines acknowledge that people do not always behave rationally and are strongly motivated by social incentives to seek approval from others and compare favorably to their peers.” I have no idea what they mean by rational.  There is nothing irrational about being motivated by social incentives or wanting to compare favorably with peers. One of the characteristics of traditional economics is that economists don’t care what your preferences are, or where they came from.The only thing that is really required for rational behavior is that you respond in predictable ways to changes in the costs and benefits of a choice, which brings us to the interventions they introduced.

In one of their interventions “whenever doctors prescribed an antibiotic that was not clearly called for by the diagnosis, the electronic health record system asked them to provide a short “antibiotic justification note.”” Wait a minute, did they just say that they increased the cost to the doctor of prescribing an unnecessary antibiotic, and doctors chose to write less unnecessary prescriptions. Let me see if I’ve got this straight. As the cost of doing something increases, other things equal, people will do it less. Thank God for behavioral economics. If only someone had thought of this before, they could have given it a name like “the law of demand” and taught it in every principles of economics course.

Next week, I think I’ll invent behavioral history, which, unlike traditional history, relies on critical analysis of primary sources. You can play along too. It’s easy. Take any discipline, x. Identify one of the primary features of that discipline, y. Assert, contrary to all evidence, that x does not do y. Claim that the new discipline “behavioral x” does y. Repackage some standard results from x as startling new results of “behavioral x.”