Opening of University of Chicago Center for Decision Research’s Mindworks lab and interactive discovery center on Michigan Avenue July 23, 2021/ Photo: Anne Ryan
“Whatever you do,” Richard Thaler, the Nobel-winning economist, admonished me, as he walked out of the new Mindworks space at Michigan and Jackson “do not call this a museum. That’s the last thing I want people to think this is.” Thaler, who is on the board of Mindworks’ parent institution, the Center for Decision Research at University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, offered the command with a smiling insistence, twice. Mindworks’ non-museum-ness seemed to be something he’d thought about seriously.
The whatever-kind-of place-it-is space is devoted to introducing the public to the insights and methods of Behavioral Science, the field that combines academic economics with psychology and other social…
