Assoc. Prof. Benjamin Bushong

“Our Changing Beliefs: Errors, Attention, and (Mis)Learning”

This is the title of the CES Lectures to be delivered by Benjamin Bushong in June (2026). In this mini-course, how people form and update beliefs under the broad umbrella of departures from the Bayesian benchmark will be examined. The lectures are designed to give a tour of the existing documented errors people make in statistical reasoning and then provide two specific mechanisms that allow those errors to persist: selective attention, and models of misspecified learning, in which agents update rationally given a model whose specification class does not contain the truth. The three parts are entitled: 1) Errors in Statistical Reasoning; 2) Failing to Pay Attention or Notice; 3) Misinferring, Mislearning, and Misspecification.

Mr. Bushong’s research focuses on the intersection of psychology and economics – also known as behavioral economics – and has appeared in academic journals including the American Economic Review, The Review of Economic Studies, and Neuron.

Benjamin Bushong is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Michigan State University. Prior to coming to MSU, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University. Prior to coming to Harvard, he worked with the U.S. Army to help soldiers become more psychologically resilient. Mr. Bushong holds a PhD in Social Science (Economics) from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and a BS in Economics from the University of Oregon.