About This Project

Traditional economics assumes that people’s consumption of external goods, like food and housing, determines a person’s wellbeing. But much of what affects people’s wellbeing are their thoughts. Some thoughts feel good and other thoughts help a person to achieve their goals. Because people cannot have all thoughts simultaneously, there is a tradeoff between having different kinds of thoughts. In our study, we will record people’s thoughts and analyze them according to an economic framework.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Advances in behavioral economics have developed models that include people’s beliefs, such as allowing preferences for consistent beliefs, for beliefs about the future, over other people's beliefs, over one's beliefs about one's ability, and over expectations of consumption. However, beliefs and thinking are not the same things and one can have beliefs about some future event and independently vary the extent to which one thinks about it. Economics has no framework for understanding thinking.

We propose that thoughts relate to wellbeing in two ways. First, thoughts can be consumed directly, such as how recalling a good memory can make us happy. Second, thoughts can be productive, like an intermediate good: an input to achieve some goal.

What is the significance of this project?

Economics lacks a framework to understand thinking despite its importance in determining behavior and welfare. This proposed project connects thinking to traditional economic models of how people make everyday choices and for how people spend time.

It is likely that people take consequential actions to think or avoid certain thoughts, and it is important for economists to be aware of this. People faced with troubling thoughts may take actions to distract themselves, such as through drug abuse or workaholism. An economic understanding of thinking may help scientists to better understand these behaviors and how they affect welfare. Establishing patterns of thought may stimulate new hypotheses about the functions of consciousness.

What are the goals of the project?

The goal of this project is to provide initial data that could facilitate the development of an economic framework of thinking.

We will use the experience sampling method to survey people by beeping them on their smartphones at random points throughout the day. We will collect thoughts, their purported cause, current activity, and subjective wellbeing.

Thoughts will be categorized into consumptive or productive thoughts. We will analyze the distribution of thoughts by gender and over the lifecycle. We will estimate the association between thoughts and wellbeing. Ultimately, we will be able to model the economic structure of thoughts and the tradeoffs between having different kinds of thoughts with various statistical analysis methods such as logistic regression.