No, I didn't do actual research. But I do have a news feature on neuroeconomics in the new issue. Here's a snippet:
Read Montague spent the summer of 2003 thinking about soft drinks. His teenage daughter was working as an intern in his lab at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and Montague, a neuroscientist, wanted to find an experiment that she could "wrap her head around". After much deliberation, he came up with the perfect research topic: recreating the Pepsi Challenge. In a brain scanner1.
Pepsi launched this advertisement, one of the most famous of all time, in the early 1980s. Television ads showed people on the street being asked to sip cola blindly from two different glasses. Not surprisingly, the ads featured Coca-Cola aficionados who, much to their astonishment, found they preferred the taste of Pepsi.
But if Pepsi really tasted better, Montague wondered, then why would Coke still be more popular? When we are standing in the supermarket, faced by cans of Coke and Pepsi, what is happening inside our brains?
Montague is at the cutting edge of a new scientific field known as neuroeconomics, which uses the experimental techniques of neuroscience to understand how the brain makes economic decisions. Biology, of course, has long been used to explain human nature; evolutionary biology seeks the causes of behaviour in terms of its fitness benefit; and cognitive psychology aims to model decision-making. Neuroeconomics is different: it seeks to understand the most immediate causes of economic choices by seeing how the brain makes them. By studying the brain at work, neuroeconomists hope to resolve well known anomalies such as why stock markets are sometimes gripped by 'irrational' exuberance, or why people rack up huge credit-card debts to buy things they don't need.
The stubborn persistence of these perplexing phenomena defies classical economics, founded as it is on two assumptions about human nature: that we are rational and that we are selfish. When confronted with a variety of options, traditional economists expect us to evaluate the possibilities (rationality) and choose whichever best matches our personal preferences (selfishness). Their mathematical models require this predictable behaviour. What the eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the "invisible hand" of the marketplace is just the collective result of lots of reasonable people going about the business of trying to maximize their own advantage. Such pure rationality is disconcertingly rare, however. Neuroeconomists want to explain why, and their research promises to affect everything from what cola we drink to how we save for retirement.
I go on to talk about 401(k)'s and the selfish origins of trust. The article ends with an optimistic quote from Daniel Kahneman, which I think accurately summarizes the state of the field:
"These researchers have the chance to come up with a general theory of decision-making that is both biologically and behaviourally accurate," Daniel Kahneman says. "They have the necessary experimental tools and are asking the right kind of questions. Now they just have to find some answers."
One brief comment about writing for Nature: it's amazing how fast scientists respond when the subject line is "Nature Magazine". No matter who I contacted - and I contacted a few Nobel Prize winners - they all wrote back to me immediately, and were perfectly willing to talk. I wish it were always that easy.
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Oh god, no!! Not the insipid Coke versus Pepsi Challenge!
Coke vs Pepsi!?! P. Read!?! Does he still have the bench press record in the Baylor Gym?
One quibble - "What the eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the "invisible hand" of the marketplace is just the collective result of lots of reasonable people going about the business of trying to maximize their own advantage. Such pure rationality is disconcertingly rare, however." If you wish to pick a fight Levitt and Dubner, you might want to start with some better examples than credit card debt and stock market bubbles..