I gave a talk about the role of identity in economics at Doug’s (Douglas Dupree’s, below) lunch. The motivation was the work by social psychologists on the test performance Asian American women, Oklahoma student camp experiment and Tajfel and Turner’s Kandinsky experiment. I talked about the work by George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton, which explains how schools and workplaces in the United States adapted to shifts in identity, which occurred over the past century. Finally, I mentioned some of my own work on modelling sexual abstinence pledging in America.
