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Newswise Richard Thaler, Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has been selected as one of three recipients of the 2014 Global Economy Prize from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

In addition to Thaler, this year's other recipients are Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberia's state president and a Nobel laureate, and Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, a biotechnology entrepreneur from India. The award is given to "honor policymakers, economists and entrepreneurs who have made a name for themselves with their pioneering spirit to establish a market economy society that is open to the world."

"It was truly a great honor to receive this award concurrently with these two extraordinary women who have each made amazing accomplishments in their chosen fields," Thaler said. "The prior winners of the academic prize are a group any economist would be proud to join." Thaler, one of the founders of the field of behavioral economics and finance, also researches the psychology of decision-making and is the director of Booth's Center for Decision Research.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Thaler's most recent book which was written with Cass Sunstein, who is on leave from the University of Chicago Law School to work in the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has sold more than 750,000 copies. The trio was celebrated for their pioneering work aimed at solving global problems at an award ceremony June 22 at Haus der Wirtschaft in Kiel, Germany.

"In their professional environment, all three prize winners constantly focused on people, their behavior and well-being," said Dennis Snower, Kiel Institute of the World Economy president. "Richard Thaler, the ancestor of behavioral economics, shattered a number of fundamental assumptions in the field of economic sciences that are based on selfish and rational behavior of human beings."

"The award is intended to deliver certain impetus with a view to resolving and overcoming the major world economic challenges of our time in dialogue with the various societal groups in a creative fashion," the Kiel Institute said in a news release.

Thaler has been at Chicago Booth since 1995.

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Richard Thaler Wins Global Economy Prize From Kiel Institute

Change your posture. Body language affects not only how others see us, but also it appears to change how we see ourselves.

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Imagine you are applying for the dream job of your life. Youve got five minutes to explain to two interviewers why they should pick you over 100 other smartly dressed candidates. As you make your presentation, the interviewers stare at you unblinkingly like a bank teller with a lobotomy.

No expression. No indication of interest. They simply watch as you pour out your pitch.

Harvard social psychologist Amy Cuddy designed this nightmarish torture session to provoke profound anxiety. She wanted subjects to be tested to their social-apprehension limits in order to test a surprisingly simple tool you and I can use when the pressure is on. So stay tuned.

Its a terrible irony that when it matters most, we often do our worst. More often than not, our emotions undermine our performance in the most crucial moments of our lives.

Stress and fear wiggle their way up through all our attempts to conceal them and reveal our feelings in predictable ways that others can discern. These little gestures telegraph feelings of weakness and damage our credibility.

Similarly, those who feel powerful behave markedly differently as well. For example, I watched one fascinating video study of nonverbal behavior on the U.S. Senate and House floors. When the video was sped up, you could immediately spot the powerful. They would stand still like a queen bee in a hive while clouds of underlings scurried about them, touching, bobbing and bowing frantically. We telegraph our feelings of both power and powerlessness all the time, and those little messages either bolster or weaken our influence.

Thats why Cuddys research is so important. Where many before her have offered advice about what to do with your body during a presentation, Cuddy wanted to test whether a remarkably modest intervention just prior to the stressful session would improve performance.

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Insights from the Behavioral Science Guy: Next time you feel nervous, assume this position

With everyone from the federal government to corporate America working to encourage more women to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, you would think the doors would be wide open to women of all backgrounds. A new study from Columbia Business School shows that this could not be further from the truth and that gender bias among hiring managers in STEM fields is extraordinarily prevalent.

"How Stereotypes Impair Women's Careers in Science," written by Ernesto Reuben, assistant professor of management at Columbia Business School, and recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals the underlying biases of hiring managers, and also demonstrates the cost of discrimination.

"Studies that seek to answer why there are more men than women in STEM fields typically focus on women's interests and choices," said Professor Reuben. "This may be important, but our experiments show that another culprit of this phenomenon is that hiring managers possess an extraordinary level of gender bias when making decisions and filling positions, often times choosing the less qualified male over a superiorly qualified female."

In an experiment in which participants were hired to perform a mathematical task, both male and female managers were twice as likely to hire a man than a woman -- even when the managers had no information beyond a candidate's appearance and, therefore, gender.

Dr. Reuben continued: "The end result is not only a less diverse workforce and a male-dominated STEM field, but also a detriment to these companies for hiring the less-skilled person for the job."

The study is co-authored by the Kellogg School of Management's Paola Sapienza and the Booth School of Business's Luigi Zingales, was recently published in PNAS.

The Field Study

To test the biases of hiring managers, Reuben and his research partners designed an experiment in which about 150 participants, in the role of job candidates, would be hired to perform a math assignment: correctly summing as many sets of four two-digit numbers as possible over a period of four minutes. Previous studies have shown that this type of arithmetic task is performed equally well by men and women. All of the candidates completed the task and were given their scores. In some versions of the experiment, the candidates were allowed to tell the managers how well they had performed, while in others their test results were not revealed.

Close to 200 other subjects, in the role of hiring managers, decided whether to hire a particular candidate to perform the task. The hiring managers also completed computer-based behavioral testing that indicated the degree to which they held stereotypes about the performance of men and women in science and math.

The Results

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New research proves gender bias extraordinarily prevalent in science, technology, engineering and math fields

Written by Steve Mosco, smosco@antonnews.com Tuesday, 17 June 2014 16:52

As Plainview Old-Bethpage High School senior Hannah Stewart prepares to ship off to Brandeis University in the fall, she, like most young adults here age, will remember the best parts of high school: spirit week, homecoming, prom and, of course, gathering lizards and ticks in northern New Jersey.

The science-minded senior recently worked under the auspices of Dr. Russell Burke, chair of the Biology Department at Hofstra University, in a research project with the goal of finding out why cases of Lyme Disease are so prevalent here in the north, but so rare down south.

This is a part of biology that Dr. Burke introduced me to that I never thought about, working with lizards and insects, said Stewart. It was far more interesting than I ever thought it could be.

For her efforts with Burke, Stewart received a third place award for a research project, titled Host Preference of Wild Northern and Southern Ixodes scapularis, at the International Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles in May. Hannah additionally tied for first place in the Behavioral and Social Sciences Division of the 2014 Long Island Science & Engineering Fair.

Her research with Burke involved a laboratory study of the black-legged tick and the spread of Lyme Disease. Burkes lab has been exploring the ecology of Lyme disease since 2007, focusing on the role that lizards play in reducing the prevalence of the disease.

Stewarts summer 2013 work explored the leading hypothesis that attempts to explain why human cases of Lyme disease are so much more common in the northern U.S. than in the south, although both the necessary ticks and bacteria occur throughout both areas.

This hypothesis is based on the observation that ticks in the south often feed on different animal host species than ticks in the north. Stewart tested whether ticks choose their hosts randomly or whether ticks from different places have different host preferences. Her work showed that both northern and southern black-legged ticks preferred lizard hosts over mammal hosts, and therefore they only feed on mammals in the north when there are no lizards available.

We found that lizards are crummy hosts for the Lyme disease bacteria, said Burke. Down south, lizards dont pass on Lyme disease and this keeps the rate of the disease low. Hannah did some experiments to find out whether ticks actually prefer to feed off of lizards or mice, and her work shows that ticks, if given the choice, will choose to feed off of lizards. Her work will help us move forward with our studies in our effort to understand the spread of this disease.

Burke said he received an email from Stewart requesting an opportunity to work in his lab. In these independent research projects, Burke chooses students that boast a high interest in biology and perform well in school. Burke said Stewart was impressive on both counts.

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Students Mind Ticks With Science