SOCIAL FACTORS IN EVALUATING ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR: PERSPECTIVES OF BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS

This article explores the role of social factors, particularly social attitudes, as indicators of social preferences in behavioral economics. It highlights the growing importance of understanding individual and group motivations in today’s interconnected social and economic systems. Behavioral economics integrates economic modeling with psychological insights, making the study of social attitudes and preferences a key tool for explaining and predicting economic behavior. Social attitudes, as enduring beliefs, emotions, and behavioral tendencies influenced by cultural norms and personal experiences, allow researchers to assess public sentiment, identify behavioral patterns, and forecast economic actions. This method is particularly effective in studying consumer behavior, trust in financial institutions, cooperation, and public attitudes toward policy reforms. The study combines theoretical analysis, systematic literature review, and empirical evidence. It uses behavioral models such as the Theory of Planned Behavior and Social Identity Theory to explain how attitudes shape preferences and behaviors. Large datasets from the World Values Survey, Eurobarometer, and national surveys demonstrate how social attitudes serve as measurable proxies for less observable preferences. Advanced data-processing technologies, including machine learning and statistical modeling, further enhance predictive robustness. The findings confirm that social attitudes reliably reflect social preferences and influence behaviors across economic contexts, such as market decisions and institutional trust. Empirical evidence shows that attitudes, measurable with tools like Likert scales, predict cooperation, consumption, and policy acceptance. Integrating large-scale datasets into experimental models enables simulations to test hypotheses, evaluate policies, and predict trends with high reliability. This research bridges gaps in behavioral economics by structuring methods for integrating social attitudes into predictive models. It demonstrates that social attitudes are valuable tools for understanding human motivations, improving economic models’ adaptability, and supporting effective socio-economic strategies’ design.