How much about the present and past do we know? And how far is it sensible to suppose that what we know helps us to guide and shape our futures? In the inconvenient circumstance that we do not know what we need, but when we just must decide, how do we cope? And what can we, as academics, contribute by way of analysis and decision support?
Although not often asked in that way, these questions are at the heart of the policy relevant- academic disciplines that have modelled themselves around approaches to judgment and decision-making claimed to be rational. For instance, economics, much applied statistics and, therefore, what is called AI, as well as areas of political and social science and psychology. In these disciplines, assumptions of rationality impose order and tractability on uncertainty with the great advantage that modelled likelihoods can be calculated using Bayesian or other sophisticated statistical techniques. But out of model-land issues are often hard to formulate, reliable probabilities are elusive, and complex interactions expand outcome spaces exponentially. Other human capacities are required.
This talk will sketch the outlines of a new multidisciplinary framework, Conviction Narrative Theory. It combines insights from brain and social science to focus attention on new sources of data and new ways of providing decision support for policy-making under radical uncertainty.
Background:
• Johnson, S., Bilovich, A., & Tuckett, D. (2022). Conviction Narrative Theory: A Theory of Choice Under Radical Uncertainty. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1-47. doi:10.1017/S0140525X220011572022
• Fenton O’Creevy, M and Tuckett, D (2022) Conviction, narratives, ambivalence, and constructive doubt: Reflections on six expert commentaries. Futures & Foresight Science.
• Collier, Paul and Tuckett, David (2021) Narratives as a Coordinating Device for Reversing Regional Disequilibrium. Oxford Review of Economic Policy. (Spring) doi:10.1093/oxrep/graa060
• Tuckett, David, Holmes, Douglas, Pearson, Alice and Chaplin, Graeme.(2020) Monetary policy and the management of uncertainty: a narrative approach. Bank of England Staff Working paper No 870. June 2020.
About the speaker:
David Tuckett is Emeritus Professor and Director of the University College London (UCL) Centre for the Study of Decision-Making under Uncertainty, Robert Schuman Visiting Fellow, European University Institute, Firenze, and a former Senior Research Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. Trained in Economics, Medical Sociology and Psychoanalysis he held previous positions at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School and Bedford College (University of London) and at Cambridge University. In 1999 he brought sociology, psychoanalysis and economics together to study the Dotcom Bubble and Crash and in 2006 was awarded a Leverhulme Research fellowship at UCL for "A Psychoanalytic Study of Investment Markets". It led to a widely acclaimed book, Minding the Markets: An Emotional Finance View of Financial Instability which details the decision-making of fifty of the world’s leading asset managers and develops the theory of emotional finance. A monograph co-authored with Richard Taffler and based on the work was also published in 2013 in New York by the Chartered Financial Analysts Research Foundation. Since 2010, supported by the Institute of New Economic Thinking, he has been collaborating with colleagues at UCL and elsewhere in economics, finance, psychology, social anthropology, computer science and neuroscience and with the Financial Stability, Monetary Policy and Research Divisions at the Bank of England to develop a new approach to modelling the micro foundations of choice, particularly for economic behaviour under uncertainty - Conviction narrative theory (CNT).