Author:
Abstract
Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn’t it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? The foundations of economic theory were constructed assuming that details about the functioning of the brain’s black box would not be known. But now neuroscience has proved the pessimistic prediction wrong; the study of the brain and nervous system is beginning to allow direct measurement of thoughts and feelings. These measurements are, in turn, challenging our understanding of the relation between mind and action, leading to new theoretical constructs and calling old ones into question. Understanding more about how the brain functions should help us understand economic behaviour. In that article, I argue that neuroeconomics can be a valuable field, but not the way it is being developed and “sold” now. The same is true more generally of behavioural economics, which shares many of the methodological flaws of neuroeconomics. In summary, I think the following is the main point. At the very least, neuroeconomics provides new data in addition to those we have available from theoretical, empirical, and experimental research on human behavior. This is the set of psychophysiological data (for example, the galvanic skin response, which gives a rough measure of the visceral response to a stimulus, or the heart rate), and the imaging analysis of brain activity, measured in several different ways (MRI and PET). I think that neuroeconomics is much more than this, but this seems an indisputable fact
Keywords
Abstract
Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn’t it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? The foundations of economic theory were constructed assuming that details about the functioning of the brain’s black box would not be known. But now neuroscience has proved the pessimistic prediction wrong; the study of the brain and nervous system is beginning to allow direct measurement of thoughts and feelings. These measurements are, in turn, challenging our understanding of the relation between mind and action, leading to new theoretical constructs and calling old ones into question. Understanding more about how the brain functions should help us understand economic behaviour. In that article, I argue that neuroeconomics can be a valuable field, but not the way it is being developed and “sold” now. The same is true more generally of behavioural economics, which shares many of the methodological flaws of neuroeconomics. In summary, I think the following is the main point. At the very least, neuroeconomics provides new data in addition to those we have available from theoretical, empirical, and experimental research on human behavior. This is the set of psychophysiological data (for example, the galvanic skin response, which gives a rough measure of the visceral response to a stimulus, or the heart rate), and the imaging analysis of brain activity, measured in several different ways (MRI and PET). I think that neuroeconomics is much more than this, but this seems an indisputable fact