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I find a lot of psychology experiments about game theory have this problem, for an example. The common mistake is to analyze it as if people were in a prisoner

I find a lot of psychology experiments about game theory have this problem, for an example. The common mistake is to analyze it as if people were in a prisoners’ dilemma situation rather than an iterated prisoners’ dilemma situation: there’s no way to fully detach lab participants from the fact that the people they’re interacting with exist in society, which is a sort of large scale iteration of all the social games. Once you realize lab participants are treating each other as members of society they’ll have to deal with in the future, instead of isolated lab rats only existing for one round of experimentation, almost all of the “people don’t understand game theory” results disappear. It seems instead we have multiple papers confirming psychologists don’t understand society.

jet_throw 8y ago
Papers are published within an academic pretense. So you also have to account for the brown nosing and sucking up to authority. You pay tuition, but you don’t get your degree without conforming your behavior to the expectations of faculty, and the institutional demands to publish words that seem like a readable corpus of text. This goes up the chain, as the expectation pervades a normative culture. Academia eats Prestigious Institutions. Institutions eat Departments. Chair of Department eats Professors. Professors eat Students. Students photosynthesize Words pleasing to the ears of their parasitic herbivores. You are what you eat.