Charts, Graphs, and Narrative

By Henry Woodbury

In an interview in Inside Higher Ed, economist Robert Frank discusses the problem of teaching the fundamental concepts of his discipline. Researchers found that students coming out of an introductory economics class scored worse on an applicable exam than those who had never take any economics courses whatsoever. So Frank, with co-author Ben Bernanke, wrote a new standard text.

While economics is the pivot for the interview, Frank offers many insights about how people gather and use information:

The narrative theory of learning now tells us that information gets into the brain a lot more easily in some forms than others. You can get information into the student’s brain in the form of equations and graphs, yes, but it’s a lot of work to do that. If you can wrap the same ideas around stories, around narratives, they seem to slide into the brain without any effort at all. After all, we evolved as storytellers; that’s what we’re good at. That’s how we always exchanged ideas and information. And if a narrative has an actor, a plot, if it makes sense, then the brain stores it quite easily; you can pull it up for further processing without any effort; you can repeat the story to others. Those seem to be the steps that really make for active learning in the brain.

Then there’s this pithy definition of behavioral economics:

One of its founders, Amos Tversky, was a psychologist at Stanford. He liked to say his colleagues study artificial intelligence; he prefers to study natural stupidity — the cognitive errors people are prone to make. It’s not that we’re stupid, but we use heuristics, we use rules of thumb, and the heuristics work well enough on average across a broad range of circumstances, but unless you really understand the logic of weighing costs and benefits, it’s very easy to be fooled into making the wrong decision.

Sounds like usability research, no?

Frank is also author of The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas and periodic essayist for the New York Times.