George Katona


George Katona was a Hungarian-born American psychologist who was one of the first to advocate a rapprochement between economics and psychology.
He graduated with a doctorate in Experimental Psychology from the University of Göttingen in 1921, and worked in Germany until 1933, both as a journalist and as a psychological researcher. Originally trained as a Gestalt psychologist working on problems of learning and memory, during the Second World War he became involved in American government attempts to use psychology to combat war-induced inflation. This led him to consider the application of psychological principles to macroeconomics, devising measures of consumer expectations that eventually became the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index. Use of this index enabled him to predict the post-war boom in the United States at a time when conventional econometric indicators were predicting a recession, a success which helped his fledgling index establish itself. Katona wrote numerous books and journal articles advocating the development of economic psychology. These general ideas were taken up more fully in Europe than in the United States until the development, after his death, of modern behavioral economics.
In 1957 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

The Psychological Analysis of Economic Behavior

Katona developed macroeconomic generalizations and predictions from empirical, microeconomic consumer survey data, rather than theorizing from idealized models or assumptions of perfectly rational participants in an economy. "Unlike pure theorists, we shall not assume at the outset that rational behavior exists or that rational behavior constitutes the topic of economic analysis," he wrote in 1951. Instead, he looked for conditions under which more or less rational behavior was likely to occur. He also sought to tie market forces to an origin in human behavior, sentiment, and decision-making. "Instead of assuming that prices, size of production, amount of purchases, etc., are set for us by impersonal factors, we shall seek to ascertain the forms, conditions, and limits of the human decisions that affect them. The self-regulatory market economy will be considered as a 'limiting case' in which human decisions are least spontaneous."
Katona contrasted "genuine decision" and "habitual behavior".

Works

BOOKS & MONOGRAPHS,
PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS & BOOK CHAPTERS,
SURVEY RESEARCH