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Logic vs. Emotion in Decision-Making
deliasee writes "Researchers at Princeton have announced the results of a brain imaging study showing that a battle between different logical and emotional sectors of the brain results in a decision. The study used a game theory scenario to investigate why people often make irrational decisions that actually go against their most logical best interests - as in, I would like to get _some_ money as opposed to _no_ money."
I make decisions based on principle. I try to stay away from doing business with companies I feel their vale/price ratio to be too high, but if their is absolutely no alternative the old adage of "you have to do what you have to do" applies. When it comes to web technology Iâ(TM)ll confesses and say I will absolutely stay away from anything M$. I mean what other choice does one have when they know M$ mission as far as the web is concerned is to control it all.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
However it is only rational to take $1 if you are absolutely sure that:
1) You will not be doing business with the other person again
2) People won't find out you're a loser.
And yes, the experiments I guess explicitly presupposes that 1) and 2) are true, but the brain probably says "Who am I to trust that?". The situation is too artificial for the brain to take seriously.
Try walking hunched on a crowded sidewalk and then try to walk straight (particularly stretch your stomach, rotate your tailbone back and press your pelvis lightly forward). People will stop bouncing into you. Why? Because a person walking straight and proud can't give way without falling, while walking hunched gives you good balance to give way in all directions. So you commit to walking staright and the game changes. People solve it through readjusting their paths at more of a distance, problem solved. I. e. you solved the problem by changing the problem: "This is what I am gonna do, you guys do what you want".
The ultimatum game has two players. Player A decides how to split up some amount of money (say $10) between the two players. Player B decides whether or not to accept. If he accepts, the money is divided accordin to the split Player A decided. Otherwise, no one gets any money.
If Player B is rational, he will always accept any non-zero sum of money. However, in practice, Player B's often refuse to accept if the split is too much in Player A's favor. Thus the emotional response (punishing Player A for lack of fairness) often ends up overcoming the logical response (taking some money over no money).
There's also a related game called the dictator game. The setup is the same, but Player B must always accept. A rational Player A should always keep all the money for himself; however, in practice, the split often gives at least some money to Player B.
Fighting over ten bucks? If I was offered nine I'd turn it down just to watch the researcher wet his pants over the bad data point.
Now, if it were a thousand bucks, and I was offered a hundred -- that's about a good dinner out -- yeah, I'd take it if I wasn't in a bad mood. But if I were feeling surly or pissed-off, I might refuse it just to make the other guy suffer too.
A million and I'm offered a hundred thousand? It doesn't matter what my mood is, I take the money. Other Joe's got nine-hundred thousand? Who cares, I got my cash!
Moral of the story: Trying to prove things on the cheap doesn't work.
Well, not quite. Nussbaum et. al are talking about the question of the objective value of emotional response: things which bring you pleasure are, ipso facto, valuable, and things which cause you pain are, ipso facto, costly. That's certainly important and true -- and, all to often, neglected -- but it's not something terribly new. You can go back to Watson and the other Chicago behaviorists and still see that idea quite explicitly stated.
There's another side of the story, though: the question of whether humans and other decision makers can be modelled as rational decision makers. We can't answer that, since we can't all agree on what a rational decision maker is, but we do know that humans and animals are not utilitarian decision makers. There's a wonderful theorem, due to Mike Cohen, which actually proves that we cannot: it is possible to use simple betting games to show that no linear preference order can account for the behavior of subjects making choices in risky scenarios. That means that humans can't be treated as simply maximizing some utility functional.
I may be remembering Nussbaum poorly here, but I'm fairly sure she makes a claim for a rational component to emotional response, or, at least, that emotional judgments cannot be distinguished from other judgments in terms of their process.
The real problem I see with my claim is that there's an unfortunate circularity to it. If every decision can be modeled as a judgment, then there is no such thing as an irrational decision - merely one with a different valuation than we would use. Thus begins a headlong slide into relativism.
The way out of that is to claim that some systems of value are better than others. In its simplest form, this is an uncontroversial claim - most of us accept that eliminating world hunger is a better value than raping small children. But most of us shy away from extreme absolutism as well - few of us seem terribly comfortable with, say, the fullest rigidity of Kantian (or Utiliatarian) ethics.
The upshot being that what I was really doing was trying to challenge the value system implied by game theory in this problem - that one ought always maximize one's prize. Concepts of social mores and ethics play into a lot of game theory examples, and complicate the matter such that game theory is just that - a theory, and one that can't really be applied to the real world as much as some would try to.
Philip Sandifer's academic website