Are we completely free at the point of decision making?
As a professor for business psychology at the University of Cologne, Professor Fetchenhauer carried out a survey concerning the image of economists throughout the population.
He found that only 15 percent of the people asked believe economists to be credible. Worse off are only politicians and astrologists, who have a credibility rate of only three percent.
Prof. Fetchenhauer blames this result on the aspect that people think of economists as the ones predicting the prospective economic development. And most of the times, their predictions don’t become true. The focus on efficiency and rationality as main criteria in economic models therefore is questioned by some people. They argue that human beings are not always rational, and that they can’t be seen as one entity which behaves in the same way, no matter what.
As one possibility to strengthen trust, the research group tells economists to try to be a better communicator with their environment.
So far, these are no findings which disturb the world (except maybe the egos of certain people out there).
What strikes me most in the findings is the insight that there is nearly no difference in decision taking and the act of judging a situation between people who are experts and people who are not, and especially no difference for people with dissimilar education level. All of them took decisions on a gut level. At least that´s what the findings suggest. So are we only lead by our instinct or do other circumstances influence our behaviour?
