Contact: Professor Kenneth Binmore
Tel. 0171 380 7864
Fax. 0171 916 2775
EMail uctpa97@ucl.ac.uk
Recent work in both economics and psychology is casting doubt on the traditional view that people generally make economic choices as rational individualists seeking the best means to achieve their ends. The reality of choice in social contexts is far more complex. In addition, there is a good deal of evidence from sociology and social anthropology that cultural norms influence the way people act. Since choice underlies much of individual life and individual choices combine to make up collective behaviour, these issues are of fundamental importance to our understanding of society.
This project seeks to tease out the detail of the relationship between individual rationality and cultural norms, paying particular attention to the possibility that people, and societies, may learn from their mistakes and by observing others. This has implications both for our immediate understanding of people's behaviour as consumers, as workers and as savers, and for longer-term theories of how social and cultural norms may evolve and be replaced, for societies as a whole and for particular social groups.
This approach has far-ranging implications for developments across most of the disciplines of social science, and will initially be pursued at a theoretical level. It has practical implications for the understanding of many issues in everyday life, for example the way in which ideas about what constitutes a fair wage or rate of taxation develop and are sustained, the practicality of social networking which often depends on agreement on and adherence to new cultural norms and the pace at which changes in industrial organisation involving shifts in the way work practices are valued can be carried out.
The work will be carried out as a collaboration between the Economics, Psychology and Anthropology departments at University College London with the involvement of visiting academics and will lead to the production of academic papers, publications and conference presentations.
KENNETH BINMORE is Professor of Economics at University College London and is one of the most widely quoted researchers in the field. His recent publications include Playing Fair: Game Theory and the Social Contract, (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1993).
ROBIN DUNBAR is Professor of Psychology at the University of Liverpool. He has published over 100 articles and six books.
H. PLOTKIN is Professor of Psychobiology at University College London. He has published over 60 papers and four books, including The Nature of Knowledge, (Harvard University Press).
DAVID ULPH is Professor of Economics at University College London. He has carried out a considerable body of research and published extensively on the problems concerned with the development of industrial organisations.
R. SEYMOUR is Lecturer in Mathematics at University College London. He has researched and published extensively on problems of biomathematics and the evolution of social systems.
RICHARD VAUGHAN is Lecturer in Economics at University College London. He has researched and published a considerable quantity of work on the measurement of welfare and on the behaviour of large interacting populations.
Return to main page
or list of projects