Shaun Hargreaves Heap’s Behavioural Political Economy: Implications for Politics and Public Policy

Shaun Hargreaves Heap is a critic of the assumption of instrumental rationality, which is still commonly applied in mainstream economics. His view of human reasoning incorporates emotions, the personal assessment of life projects, intuitions, and preference reversal, often occurring alongside instrumental calculation. As a result his work has breadth, a critical outlook, and is highly interdisciplinary, appealing to many different kinds of scholars, whether behavioural economists, public policy analysts, political theorists, or political scientists. Using laboratory experiments, he and his collaborators often produce surprising and counterintuitive findings, challenging conventional wisdoms, such as the benefits and costs of group membership. Above all, his work concerns institutions of various kinds, whose design needs to take into account the multidimensional character of human beings. With effective principles to guide them, policy-makers may introduce more effective interventions and thereby promote human flourishing.