“He’s very innovative; he’s on the cutting edge of both economics and psychology,” Laibson adds.
Mullainathan says he finds the prospect that small changes in public policy can have a large impact on human behavior particularly inspirational.
“With small amounts of activity, small changes to economic behavior, we can get big impacts on health, life and death, and poverty,” he says. “Normally, we have fairly expensive solutions to problems like that.”
Psychology and economics, combined in one field, offers a greater range of instruments with which to implement social policies. Mullainathan’s work explores how the use of psychological factors that influence people’s decisions can help construct effective social programs.
In fact, Mullainathan says the opportunity to work with Harvard’s psychology department was one of the reasons he left MIT. “The psychology department made the decision much easier,” he says.
FINDING THE COURSES
Currently, students who want to concentrate in both psychology and economics have to split their coursework between the two subjects.
Xu says that her joint concentration in Psychology and Economics “forces me to take classes in departments I wouldn’t have looked at before, so I got a lot more exposure.”
“It makes you work harder,” Xu adds. “But you might actually expose yourself to more.”
The Economics Department looks forward to adding more behavioral economics courses to its current offerings, a move that will make the joint concentration easier for many students.
“In the future, yes, we’ll offer more courses in psychology and economics,” says Alesina. “Certainly there’s been an increase in the number of graduate students interested in this area, and I suspect this is the same for undergraduate economics concentrators.”
Alesina suggested that in the future, courses may be jointly offered by the Psychology and Economics Departments.
“I think if there were more classes in the field, more students would concentrate in it because it would require less effort. They wouldn’t have to go to a social psychology class and a microeconomics class,” says Lowin.
The interdisciplinary and innovative nature of the field makes Mullainathan’s behavioral economics courses appealing to students.
“It’s the newest research, and we don’t have solutions to all of the problems he poses. That’s one of the reasons he runs it like a discussion,” says Baillie F. Aaron ’07, a student taking Economics 1035 with Mullainathan.
Students say Mullainathan’s teaching style complements the new research covered in his course.
“He likes to get the class involved,” says James Z. Morocco ’06, who is also taking Economics 1035.
Mullainathan incorporates discussions of crime, discrimination and other social phenomena into his course.
“I’m trying to take social problems that are important,” Mullainathan says. “And I’m trying to say, ‘lets look at this one problem from an economic perspective and look at this problem from a psychological perspective, and look at how they complement or how they conflict with each other.’”
—Staff writer Tina Wang can be reached at tinawang@fas.harvard.edu.