George Lowenstein
Emotions and Economics
Intro
George Loewenstein is a pioneer and founder of behavioral economics. He was one of the first to blend together the disciplines of psychology and economics and continues to be a leader in the field today. He has great insight into the nuances between our psyche and the decisions we make, which has allowed him to discover many of the cognitive biases that we discuss on our website. In particular, Loewenstein’s goal was to bring emotions back into the realm of economic theory, in order to understand their significant role in shaping human behavior.1 By taking human emotions into account, he strives to better understand the way that humans actually behave rather than rely solely on economic models. As a result of Loewenstein’s idiosyncratic views on the interdependence of psychology and economics, the field of behavioral economics continues to grow and enable us to adjust economic theories and models to become better predictors of imperfect human behavior.
George Loewenstein is the author of over 200 journal articles and various books. He is perhaps mostly recognized as the co-author of a 1989 paper Anomalies: Intertemporal Choice, which describes present-based biases. His work is often also related to discussions in affective forecasting, which examines how people predict their future emotional states.2 These ground-breaking insights deviate from rational economic models that fail to take into account human biases when making predictions.
Loewenstein is an economist, a neuroeconomist, a psychologist, an author, and an educator. He is a founder of multiple fields because he is unafraid to deviate from the norm. His curiosity into how mysterious emotions impact money and life-decisions has allowed an entire field to be created, one which he believes is only beginning to scratch the surface on how psychology and economics intersect.1 We owe much of the work that we do here, at The Decision Lab, to Loewenstein, who teaches us that we should not be afraid to step outside the box.
Curiosity is inherently dynamic and propulsive, not sedentary and passive. Most traditional instruction depends on the latter state and seeks to control the former. This is true, especially of the interrupting student or precocious child who wanders about, ignoring the lesson while remaining intent on some mission of his or her own.3
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
