Three ways behavioral economics helps us understand the world

Behavioral economics has established itself as one of the most fruitful fields for understanding how people make decisions in real-world contexts. It is no longer just about studying biases or irrationalities in the abstract, but about analyzing how social norms, emotions, identity, language, and expectations influence decisions that affect markets, organizations, and everyday life.

The 2026 edition of the III Esade Workshop in Behavioral and Experimental Economics (EWBEE) brought together in Barcelona internationally renowned researchers in the field to discuss three major themes that reflect well where the discipline is heading today: how influence is built and evidence is interpreted, how to activate more sustainable behaviors, and how biases and social norms continue to shape the paths of women and men.

Evidence and influence: why facts are not always enough

The first day opened with the plenary talk “Evidence and Influence”, given by Marta Serra-Garcia (Rady School of Management, UC San Diego). The title itself points to a central tension of our time: having evidence does not, on its own, guarantee a change in beliefs or behavior.

That thread continued in a session bringing together work on the persuasive power of numbers versus words, the cost of peer endorsements, the social transmission of prejudice, and the relationship between toxicity on social media and mental health. Speakers included Mattie Toma (University of Warwick), Manuel Muñoz (NYU Abu Dhabi), and David Schindler (Tilburg University). Fabrizio Germano (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) also explained the role of social and algorithmic learning in the digital economy.

Taken together, these talks suggest a powerful idea: decisions do not depend solely on the content of the information, but also on who conveys it, how it is framed, and the social environment in which it circulates.

Seen in perspective, this block showed that influence does not operate through material incentives alone. It also works through reputation, social validation, group identity, and repeated exposure to certain messages. For companies, regulators, and public organizations, this line of research is especially valuable because it helps design more realistic interventions: it is not enough to “provide information” — one must also understand how people process it and what social or emotional frictions mediate its effect.

The day also closed with a second plenary talk given by Joël van der Weele (University of Amsterdam) on rationalizations and political polarization, broadening the debate on evidence and influence still further, from a more theoretical perspective. In a context of growing informational fragmentation, understanding why people reinterpret inconvenient facts or fit them to their political identities is a key question for both political economy and democracy.

Sustainability: how to shift behavior in the context of externalities

A second major theme of the workshop was sustainability. Papers presented included cooperation with stock externalities, by Marco Casari of the University of Bologna; socially responsible investment, by Peiran Jiao of Maastricht University; emotions and support for climate policies, by Enrico Longo of the University of Hamburg; and co-benefit framing in climate action, presented by Ganga Shreedhar of the London School of Economics).

This block reflects very well one of the most valuable contributions of behavioral economics to the ecological transition: showing that the problem is not only one of preferences or prices, but also of attention, social norms, emotions, and perceived efficacy. In other words, even when people support sustainable goals, they may not act accordingly if they feel their individual contribution barely matters, if they receive contradictory signals, or if the collective benefits seem too abstract or distant.

The talks on socially responsible investment, emotions and support for climate policies or climate empowerment all point in that direction: advancing sustainability is not just about offering the right economic incentives. It is also necessary to understand how individuals interpret their responsibilities, how they react to different narrative framings, and to what extent they believe others — including powerful actors — will do their part.

This has very concrete implications. In public policy, for example, it helps explain why some climate measures gain support while others meet resistance. In business, it allows companies to rethink how to communicate ESG strategies, mobilize investors and employees, or design collective decisions in the presence of externalities. Seen through a behavioral lens, sustainability appears not only as a technological or regulatory problem, but also as a problem of human coordination.

Gender economics: identity, norms, and professional ambition

The second day of EWBEE 2026 was clearly focused on the third major theme: gender economics. The day began with the talk “Managing Identity” by Katie Coffman (Harvard Business School), followed by a session devoted to gender differences in self-promotion (Roel van Veldhuizen, Lund University), gender norms, family, and career (Natalia Montinari, University of Bologna), attribution of credit and blame (Lina Lozano, Burgundy School of Business), and motivated beliefs linked to inequality (Yiming Liu, WZB Berlin).

The combination of these works is especially thought-provoking because it treats gender not merely as a descriptive variable, but as a dimension deeply connected to identity, social expectations, and self-perception. Questions such as who promotes themselves, who asks for professional advice, who takes credit for success or blame for failure, and how family norms shape career decisions are essential for understanding why inequalities persist even when formal rules of equality exist.

From this perspective, gender economics does not simply document pay or representation gaps. It also studies the behavioral mechanisms that sustain them: differences in confidence, exposure to social norms, implicit sanctions, ambiguity about one's own performance, or patterns of unequal recognition. This makes the field especially relevant for organizations seeking to improve their selection, promotion, and leadership practices.

Moreover, the choice of this theme underscores something important about the current direction of behavioral economics: it is increasingly interested in structural phenomena and not only in isolated individual decisions. Gender is a good example of this, as it shows how biases and norms operate within institutions — companies, households, labor markets — and how these mechanisms end up compounding into persistent inequalities.

How to better understand complex decisions

Taken together, EWBEE 2026 showed a mature, applied, and ambitious behavioral economics — a discipline that no longer merely points out that people are not always perfectly rational, but tries to understand when, why, and with what consequences they depart from that ideal. And, above all, how that knowledge can be used to design better organizations, better policies, and better decision-making environments.

If the 2025 edition helped show how behavioral economics sheds light on decisions at work, in markets, and in democracy, the 2026 edition added three lenses especially relevant to the present moment: the influence of evidence in a saturated public sphere, the activation of sustainable behaviors amid climate urgency, and the role of identity and norms in gender inequality.

The conference was organized for the third consecutive year by three researchers from ESADE's Department of Economics, Finance, and Accounting: Anna Bayona, Tanushree Jhunjhunwala, and Pedro Rey. In addition to the speakers, the workshop drew a total of 50 attendees, many of them from the broad community of researchers working in behavioral science across various Barcelona institutions (ESADE, UAB, UB, UPF, IAE-CSIC, among others). International experts in behavioral science and experimental economics also stood out for their contributions, including Uri Simonsohn (ESADE) and Jordi Brandts (IAE-CSIC).