Finding critical responses to academic articles

March 27, 2010 8:21 PM

How do I have critical responses to a particular academic journal article?

I am looking for critical responses to a particular journal article, and am unsure how to go about looking.

This is the article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2677736

I would look through the articles that cite it, but there are so many (over 700).

Any ideas about how to approach this?

posted by ethulin to Education (7 answers total)

I don't know your field, but since Google Scholar ranks the papers that cite Henrich et al. by the number of times they've been cited, I'd think the first few citations would be good places to start.
posted by lukemeister at 8:34 PM on March 27, 2010

The easiest way is to find a university professor in the specialty and ask them.

You could also do a keyword search of the those 700 articles using critical keywords like "problem," "refute," etc.

A simple google search with the title and critical key words might not be unsuccessful.
posted by oddman at 8:36 PM on March 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

First, the full artcile is available here. I didn't read the whole article, but basically looked at what it's about. Basically it's looking at variations in the ways in which people are economically rational. There are other critiques of economic rationality. Look up Herbert Simon on bounded rationality, social exchange theory, and embeddedness theory. THink about how each of those would see the article. It looked a little game-theory-ish, so you might also want to look at critiques of game theory.

And then go back and look at defenses or modifications of economic rationality. I'm thinking something in behavioural economics (though I couldn't say what), might make a case along the lines of "sure people aren't rational fully, but we can see them as rational in at least this way..."
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 8:38 PM on March 27, 2010

Do you have access to databases like EBSCO? I ran a search there and was given 57 articles that cited your original article. Try looking in specialized databases, if Google scholar is casting too wide a net.

Here are some places to start. Academic and larger public libraries might have some of these resources available on their computers.

ABI/Inform Complete
Business & Industry
Business Full Text
Business Source Premier
EconLit

Here's some examples of citing sources. Is this the kind of thing you're looking for?

An economic anatomy of culture: Attitudes and behaviour in inter- and intra-national ultimatum game experiments. Chuah, Swee-Hoon; Hoffmann, Robert; Jones, Martin; Williams, Geoffrey. Journal of Economic Psychology, Oct2009, Vol. 30 Issue 5, p732-744, 13p; DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2009.06.004; (AN 44173360)
Database: Business Source Premier

Behavioral experiments: how and what can we learn about human behavior.Full Text Available By: Santos, Ana C.. Journal of Economic Methodology, Mar2009, Vol. 16 Issue 1, p71-88, 18p; DOI: 10.1080/13501780802684278; (AN 37154183)
Database: Business Source Premier

Human Motivation and Social Cooperation: Experimental and Analytical Foundations.Citation Only Available By: Fehr, Ernst; Gintis, Herbert. Annual Review of Sociology, 2007, Vol. 33 Issue 1, p43-64, 22p; (AN 26613913)
Database: Business Source Premier
posted by wowbobwow at 8:58 PM on March 27, 2010

Yeah, agree about EBSCO and the other online databases. That is what I would do.

That study is pretty interesting stuff. I didn't read it very thoroughly, but I definitely am skeptical about the study itself. In particular the assessment of emotional decisions based on showing pictures of the products versus text of name of the products. This just seems a little sketchy. While there are author cites other studies for this, I would think that you could get different results depending on the types of products used, the way the pictures present the products, and how well the text descriptions adequately described the product. Even if people study longer product descriptions beforehand. I would think the studies cited may even specifically address this, so you might find something from looking at those.

For example, show one person a choice between "one John Grisham hard cover book" and a "two pound gold bar" and people will probably be pretty consistent and may even be more consistent than when showing pictures of the products. But I would think it would be totally different for products that are less like commodities, which is the case especially for tech products and especially for these types of tech products. Take the "LED Mult-tool"--a product like this could be as cheap as $10 or $20 or as expensive as $100 or even more.

Could be totally misunderstanding things here, but that was what jumped out at me.
posted by stevenstevo at 10:23 PM on March 27, 2010

Email the author.
posted by chillmost at 4:47 AM on March 28, 2010

Annual Reviews is a service that indexes reviews of the social sciences and hard science. I found 3 citations directly mention your original article, somewhere in the text. You'd have to find a library that subscribes to this service to see full text, but anyone can search for citations. Hope this helps...

BEYOND RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY
Raymond Boudon
Abstract Skepticism toward sociology has grown over recent years. The attention granted to rational choice theory (RCT) is, to a large extent, a reaction against this situation. Without doubt, RCT is a productive instrument, but it fails signally in ...
Annual Review of Sociology. Volume 29, Page 1-21, Aug 2003

Human Motivation and Social Cooperation: Experimental and Analytical Foundations
Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis
Abstract Since Durkheim, sociological explanations of social cooperation have emphasized the internalization of values that induce norm compliance. Since Adam Smith, economic explanations of social cooperation have emphasized incentives that induce selfish ...
Annual Review of Sociology. Volume 33, Page 43-64, Aug 2007

A Behavioral Account of the Labor Market: The Role of Fairness Concerns
Ernst Fehr, Lorenz Goette, Christian Zehnder
Annual Review of Economics. Volume 1, Page 355-384, Sep 2009
posted by wowbobwow at 9:54 AM on April 1, 2010