When he was an undergraduate at Princeton, Syon Bhanot got a D on his macroeconomics midterm.

“I studied hard,” says Bhanot. “I wasn’t out drinking. I did everything right. So I thought, maybe I’m just bad at economics.”

He put the subject to one side, imagining he might devote his life to humanitarian work or foreign policy. After a year working in a Kenyan refugee camp, he enrolled in the Master in Public Policy program at Harvard’s Kennedy School, which required several economics courses. To his surprise, his placement exam exempted him from the economics courses — and his classmates started coming to him for economics help.

What started with a couple of students grew to five, and then 20. Soon, almost the entire class was crowding into his room, convinced he was explaining the material more clearly than the professor.

It was an experience that helped Bhanot — now an associate professor of economics at Swarthmore — see his outsider’s perspective on economics as an asset. It gave him a fresh angle on economic concepts, an outlook that later shaped his choice of field: behavioral economics, which examines the gap between the tidy assumptions of economic theory and the messy reality of human behavior.

Economists often assume that people are rational, constantly optimizing and pursuing our own self-interest. But much of the time, behavioral economists say, we’re not.

Many of us fail to save enough for retirement, despite knowing we should. We put off exercising, or we skip our medications, despite fully understanding the benefits. We’re often driven more by social norms or complexity avoidance than by cold hard reason. “Nobody has ever read the terms and conditions on anything, right?” says Bhanot. “But the law is based on the idea that we always do. So behavioral economics asks: What if people are systematically deviating from what economists consider rational?”

Bhanot’s research tests theoretical ideas by running large field experiments in the real world. Working with businesses, governments, and national and international organizations, he studies the sorts of interventions that might help encourage socially beneficial behavior. He has made some important discoveries.

In Kenya, Bhanot helped develop a digital health tool that used SMS reminders and motivational messages to encourage people to take their TB medications — and showed in a randomized experiment that the tool had a direct impact on positive health outcomes for patients. Also in Kenya, he designed and tested a small-scale social welfare program. Recruiting 432 Kenyans living below the poverty line, Bhanot and his team watched what happened when some participants were given vouchers in exchange for work, while others were given vouchers after sitting in a waiting room instead. People, Bhanot found, reported increased well-being when they earned their vouchers through labor.

It's a politically controversial finding. Bhanot is careful to note this doesn’t mean people should always work for welfare.

Syon Bhanot

"I like entertaining people, but I’m not funny enough to do stand-up comedy," he says. "So I decided I could help students think more analytically about the world instead.”

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“I worry about misinterpretation,” he says. “We weren’t saying we should have work requirements for every welfare program. In the paper, we caveat it and put the evidence in its proper context — but as soon as you put it out there, people can misrepresent it.”

Bhanot also helped unwittingly flag one of the biggest academic scandals of recent times. In 2012, Francesca Gino, a Harvard behavioral scientist, co-authored a study that showed that when people sign truthfulness declarations at the top of financial paperwork, it increases the chances they will provide honest answers. In 2023, following revelations that she had falsified data, Gino was fired.

But several years before the fraud was revealed, Bhanot had tested the same idea with thousands of people and found the honesty pledges made no difference. Some researchers advised him not to publish the study, in part because it contradicted Gino’s findings. But Bhanot disagreed.

“I don't believe in that at all,” he says. “That’s not what science is.”

Nor is Bhanot afraid to wade into hot-button issues. In one ongoing study with Emily Dai '25, he reimagines the classic “here’s $10, share it or keep it” experiment with a twist: partners were asked to disclose their preferred pronouns, in some cases only voluntarily if they wished. The results broke neatly along political lines, with Republicans being less generous to partners using nonbinary pronouns, while Democrats withheld their generosity from those who did not share their pronouns. The paper isn’t published yet, but the findings are already generating controversy.

“Pronoun disclosure is a really important social phenomenon,” he says. “And very much part of our political dialogue right now. It shouldn’t be taboo to study its effects.”

These days, though, the once-reluctant economics student is happiest in the classroom.

“I’m a weirdo,” he laughs. “I can teach for four hours and have tons of energy walking out of class. I like entertaining people, but I’m not funny enough to do stand-up comedy. So I decided I could help students think more analytically about the world instead.”

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