Prophets, Psychics and Phools: The Year in Behavioral Science

Behavioral science has become the usual term for psychological and economic research on human behavior, often designed to explore people’s biases and blunders. For that research, 2015 has been a banner year, with an unusually large number of important books. Five of them stand out -- and two of these weren’t even written by social scientists.

“Phishing for Phools,” by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, is an instant classic. Akerlof and Shiller contend that free markets lead companies to “phish” -- to exploit both the ignorance and the behavioral biases of “phools” (also known as human beings). One of their major contributions is to show that if we care about people’s well-being, the invisible hand is often the problem, not the solution.