neuroeconomics
razib | May 13, 2009
When I found out a while back that Jonah Lehrer's next book was titled How We Decide, I knew I was going to check it out. It's no coincidence that I recently reviewed Predictably Irrational, I blog because I'm interested in reducing the human animal down its basic units of organization. Due to my disciplinary focus I generally touch upon behavior genetics or the inferences of human history one can glean from evolutionary genetics. History, psychology and economics are all domains which have piqued my interest. But I'll be honest and admit that I tend to avoid neuroscience because there's a…
purepedantry | April 27, 2009Razib and I have a discussion up at Bloggingheads.tv about genetics and behavior as well as a brief discussion of neuroeconomics. Check it out below the fold:
ddobbs | January 25, 2009
The book opens so thrillingly -- a plane crash, a last-second Super Bowl victory, and a first chapter that comfortably reconciles Plato and Ovid with Tom Brady and John Madden -- that it spawns a worry: Can the book possibly sustain this pace?
"How We Decide" delivers. Jonah Lehrer, -- author of "Proust Was a Neuroscientist," blogger at Frontal Cortex, and (full disclosure) an online acquaintance and sometime colleague of mine for a couple years now (I asked him to take over editorship of Scientific American's Mind Matters last year, and we share blogging duties at VeryShortList:Science)…
purepedantry | January 9, 2009I caught this neuroscience question over at a new blog I like, Think Markets. Sandy Ikeda comments on a section of Daniel Gilbert's book Stumbling on Happiness:
I've been thinking about the following from Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness:
Experiments have demonstrated that the moment we encounter an object, our brains instantly analyze just a few of its key features and then use the presence or absence of these features to make one very fast and very simple decision: "Is this object an important thing to which I ought to respond right now? [...] As such, our brains are designed to…
purepedantry | June 16, 2008One of the most interesting aspects of human behavior is our nearly infinite capacity to arrange and coordinate symbols. Think of the symbols that permeate our existence. Paper money has no value in and of itself. A wedding ring is just a band of metal. The progress of the science might even be seen as the creation of an incredibly elaborate super-abstraction from which we can derive novel and testable predictions. Humans beings, in short, are into symbols.
We know, however, that we are not the only animals capable of symbolic thinking. For example, I could argue that whenever I teach a…
purepedantry | April 16, 2008Nature News is reporting on a paper that just came out in PNAS. The paper, Coates and Herbert, correlates the daily profits and trading volatility of traders in London. They argue that changes in these hormone may be responsible for changes in trader profits and market volatility.
Let's file this paper under "wildly over-interpreted" because there are some big caveats that you have to remember before you can make a claim anything like that.
Coates and Herbert measured morning levels of testosterone and daily levels of cortisol (average of two measurements) in 17 male traders in the City of…
purepedantry | April 15, 2008Greg Mankiw linked to this article in the Washington Post by experimental philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah points out that whether you think a tax system is equitable is determined partly by whether it is framed as a loss or a gain:
In the 1970s, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling used to put some questions to his students at Harvard when he wanted to show how people's ethical preferences on public policy can be turned around. Suppose, he said, that you were designing a tax code and wanted to provide a credit -- a rebate, in effect -- for couples with children. (I'm…
purepedantry | January 22, 2008A lot of people on ScienceBlogs are talking about this paper, Hockings et al., which shows that male chimps will trade food for sex. The food in this case is papayas stolen from nearby farms; foraged food is apparently not traded in particularly large amounts. The chimps will also give papayas to other males as a means of advertising their prowess and reproductive fitness or possibly as a means of reinforcing social bonds in the raiding party.
Now Greg Laden and Afarensis analyze the anthropological aspects of this paper, and they have much more articulate things to say on that subject.…
purepedantry | May 2, 2007The Freakonomics guys have a simply hysterical article in the New York Times magazine about monkey economics. The article discusses how monkeys possess the mental apparatus for economic valuation including the use of money. They train the monkeys to use silver tokens as currency to trade for food, and then they show that the monkeys behave very similarly to humans in a variety of situations. Money quote:
The capuchin is a New World monkey, brown and cute, the size of a scrawny year-old human baby plus a long tail. ''The capuchin has a small brain, and it's pretty much focused on food and…
purepedantry | June 28, 2006Are there neurobiological correlates of economic behavior such as utility seeking? The answer is yes, as demonstrated by some very elegant work by Berns et al in Science.
Bern et al. wanted to establish what areas activate during the feeling of dread. Dread is defined as the feeling during the wait for a bad outcome that one knows is going to be inevitable. Why would we have dread? What is the purpose of dread? Well, the decision about whether to delay a bad outcome or get it over with quick is determine, in their view, by a comparison of the utility of the time during the delay to the…