Social Psychology and the Narrative Economy
Economics can benefit through adopting various ideas from social psychology. Social and economic processes can be analysed at different levels: the microlevel (individuals), mesolevel (system structures), and macrolevel (whole socioeconomic system). Contr
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Abstract Economics can benefit through adopting various ideas from social psychology. Social and economic processes can be analysed at different levels: the microlevel (individuals), mesolevel (system structures), and macrolevel (whole socioeconomic system). Contrary to classic economic models, when making decisions, people do not consider all available information at the microlevel— this is not possible. Decisions may have many competing dimensions and there may be no single optimum. Whereas in traditional economy the main difference between the levels is the degree of aggregation, social constructionism studies how individuals cooperatively create, change and maintain their understanding of the world. Meanings arise as a result of coordinated action of humans who interpret their world by building models of it and how it functions. A natural way of acquiring meanings and conveying them to others is through narratives—stories that have a beginning, a body, and an end. Narratives exist at all levels of social reality. They provide the structure by which an individual can understand the world, with their roles in narratives individuals suggesting how to behave. Interacting individuals socially construct narratives bottom-up. Group narratives emerge from integration of stories describing individual experiences of actors. Shared narratives allow actors to find commonality in their experiences, find coherence in the flow of events and allow them to coordinate in common actions. At the macrolevel narratives define the system and its common culture. Sometimes narration may have more impact on an economy than hard data. Even the choice of which facts we refer to and those we do not may determine the leading narrative and hence the behaviour of people. Socio-economic processes can and should be analysed in line with narratives linking individuals, organisations and societies to better understand what is happening in the whole economic system.
A. Nowak () • M. Kacprzyk-Murawska • E. Serwotka Department of Psychology, University of Warsaw, ul. Stawki 5/7, Warsaw 00-183, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 J. Johnson et al. (eds.), Non-Equilibrium Social Science and Policy, Understanding Complex Systems, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42424-8_3
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1 Introduction In the traditional approach to economy models of rational choice describe individual decisions, where it is assumed that each individual makes decisions independently of the others, maximising his or her utility. It is also assumed that choices of individuals can be summed at higher levels of aggregation, with the laws operating on the group and societal levels being directly derived from the rules that govern individual behaviour. A further assumption, that economic systems are at equilibrium, underlies the formal orthodox descriptions of the properties of economic systems. Recent empirical research has challenged the theoretical assumptions of classical economic theory, while the inability of these theories to predict the econom
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