17 May 2022
Nick Chater
Session 1A ‘Can cognitive science create a cognitive economics?’
Speaker: Nick Chater
“…There is a prospect of moving from behavioural economics to a genuinely cognitive economics…”
Our first speaker of the Symposium is Nick Chater. Nick held chairs at both Warwick and UCL before joining WBS in 2010. Nick holds over 200 publications and 4 national awards for his contribution to psychology research. In answering the posed question Nick will look at three, key, productive ways in which cognitive science intersects with economics, and the promising outcomes they have for the industry.
Personal reflections from Patrick Schotanus:
“For me, Nick’s 2015 paper (““Can cognitive science create a cognitive economics?”) was one of the first to suggest a proper peak beyond behavioural economics. Namely in a way that emphasises what I like to call the interiority of minds. Like many of our speakers he crosses borders between disciplines and has worked with some of the best in this field. And although his interpretation of cognitive economics (like that of others) differs from that in our programme, we all are working, I believe, to push the envelope of behavioural economics to new frontiers, beyond identifying new biases, etc.”
Sir Geoff Mulgan CBE
Session 1B ‘Collective intelligence, cognition and the life of real economies.’
Speaker: Geoff Mulgan
“Economics has developed many theories based around information and the signalling of markets. It now needs a broader conception of shared intelligence and its role in the real life of economies.”
Sir Geoff Mulgan CBE is Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London (UCL). Prior to that he was Chief Executive of Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation (an endowment which grew in worth to around £450m) between 2011 and the end of 2019. Using recent empirical papers Geoff will discuss the frameworks which provide new tools for understanding the mind of the economy, and beyond this, methods of intervention to improve the economy’s cognitive capacity.
Personal Reflections from Patrick Schotanus:
“I bought Geoff’s book Big Mind simply because of its topics (not knowing who he was; found that out later). His particular angle is the flip-side (but related to) our “market-as-mind”. So, Geoff and his colleagues at UCL are interested in, what I like to call, “mind-as-market”. Specifically, getting our collective intelligence as efficient as possible. After reading it, I contacted him in the Spring of 2019 and luck would have it that he was going to visit Edinburgh that summer (at the time in his role of CEO of Nesta). I organised a meeting with Geoff at the business school of the University of Edinburgh, attended by Ron Chrisley, Duncan Pritchard, and Dave Ward (all again participants in this symposium). Another deep-dive unfolded in that meeting, with early ideas to share research, etc. It has not only resulted in Geoff speaking at this symposium, but also in a draft paper that James Clunie and I hope to submit to the journal Collective Intelligence.”
See the full agenda here | Find the pre-symposium material here
