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."

Comments

Re:i'm confused....

[ceejayoz]

Basically, one person has $10 and the other has $0. The person with $10 has to offer money to the other person.

Now, if the person with $10 offers $1 to the other, both people "win" - person A is up $9, person B is up $1. So, it would be logical for person B to accept the offer.

In most cases, though, person B will reject the offer - as it seems unfair for him to be only getting a small amount. S/He rejects the offer, even though it means BOTH people get nothing.

So, it's a nice illustration of rational vs. irrational thought.

Re:i'm confused....

[melete]

You don't really need to understand game theory to get this application of it.

Basically, two random individuals are put in a situation with a few ground rules (one being that this is the only time these two people will play this game together)

Person A is then allowed to offer person B a portion of $10; if person B accepts, person A gets to keep the remainder of the $10; if person B rejects the offered money, neither of them get any of the money.

The article is saying that people tend to reject low offers (like $1) since obviously, they want at least $5 of the money, and see less than that as unfair.

Based on Principle.

[saden1]

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.

Limits of simple GT scenarios

[jeorgen]

Some of these Game Theory scenarios do not include the bigger social picture. Sometimes it's rational to turn down a paltry offer and make it so that both loses, even when that could be seen as irrational.

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".

/jeorgen

Re:i'm confused....

[Chris Pimlott]

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.

David Hume on the helix of passion/reason.

[Shwag]

Hume

figured that out more then 200 years ago.
Why is science always the last to figure things out?

In a related story...

[anthony_dipierro]

9 out of 10 slashdotters said they would be willing to pay $1 to watch Bill Gates lose $9.

Re:i'm confused....

[zenyu]

So, it's a nice illustration of rational vs. irrational thought.


I don't think it's that clearcut. In our normal lives you often have transactions where you will never interact with the same person again, but by punishing bad actors you often get them to behave better in future transactions. The punishing them costs you more than just ignoring bad actor, but you accept that for everyone you bust and spend time dealing with someone that was going to harm you in the future is being punished for harming someone else.

The way I understand this expirement was run was that each person got to either make 10 offers to 10 different people, or accept/reject 10 offers from 10 different people. On average the least punishing player will end up with the most money of all the people accepting and rejecting offers. But I bet you would also notice that in a egaliterian society (small democratic republic say) the split will be 1:1 and they will have near the highest total payout. In a broken society the split will be more like 1:4 in favor of the offerers, and many transactions will be rejected. Here the least punising receiver will have much more money than the most punishing, unlike in the egaliterian society where the income inbalance will be small. Since they didn't write about this in the article I think the expirementers really don't understand what they are dealing with, or the reporter is just clueless.

If they are right about a considerable emotional component it is probably just rightous indignation, something you might need in order to overcome the rational thought that you can get the most money by leaving the punishment to others. There is a bit of a prisoners dilema though, because if everyone else does the same thing you will get a smaller payoff next time, and no matter what they did you have betrayed another receiver so there would also be the emotion of guilt for your evil dead. There would be less guilt if you've been cheated much before, or if you get a low offer next time. This reinforces the brokeness in broken societies, conversely a fair offer next time will reenforce good feelings about a previous punishing round.

It sort of makes sense that this is acts as an emotion and not just on the rational level. Presumably we developed the emotional part of the brain before we got rational, and this kind of skill would be needed for any social group large enough to have strangers. Not having "a conscience" might be what restricts some of our primate cousins to small groups, they are restricted to group sizes where the possibility of developing a bad reputation is enough to keep actors in line. (Possibly it's just bad government :) I wonder if bonobos treat strangers better than other chimps...)

Still I'm not convinced, memory lights up all over the brain, and you would be remembering previous times you were cheated when considering not punishing the bad actor, i.e. cheating yourself. The emotion they measure might be just a side effect of accessing memory associated with being cheated and hence associated with feeling rotten or angry.

Real story: Researchers are cheap bastards.

[Eevee]

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.

What are emotions

[Snowspinner]

I admit, I'm somewhat curious how "emotion" is defined for the purpose of this study. At least some credible people, most notably Martha Nussbaum, claim that emotions are in fact a form of rational response, depending on a conscious judgment of value. When I am upset that my cat died, this emotion is based on the judgment that my cat was valuable to me, which is a rational decision, not an irrational one.

In other words, the game theory model may be flawed here. If, for some people, seeing someone who has slighted them be unsatisfied is pleasurable, than it has a value. If that value is greater than $1, then it is a rational decision for them to choose not to accept the deal. The game theory model assumes that the pleasure of that has no value, however, and is thus an inaccurate model.

And yes, I do think money is a reasonable measure of value, so long as you accept that there are some things (Being punched in the face) with a value of $0, and some things (Not having to shoot your sister in the head) that are worth an infinite amount of money.

Re:What are emotions

[YU Nicks NE Way]

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.

Re:What are emotions

[Snowspinner]

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.

Re:i'm confused....

[mbogosian]

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).

This is assuming that keeping A from getting any money has no value to Player B. If it's worth a buck to Player B to say, "Fuck you!" to Player A, then the line isn't that clear.

The behavior isn't necessarily irrational, it's just that there are non-monetary results that still have value to the players.

re: Real story: Researchers are cheap bastards

[obtuse]

Yup. Odds aren't all that is important. Logical best interests are often misrepresented. A buck isn't a thousand.

The difference between a buck and a thousand becomes qualitative in addition to quantitative because those extra few orders of magnitude can change your life. That's not irrational.

Would I risk my home to invest in a double or nothing bet that I had a 55% chance of winning? No. Even though the odds are in my favor, the downside is too ugly. Someone in a less expensive part of the world, or with more resources, might choose differently.

Don't bet more than you can afford to lose. Almost everybody understands that. There is a converse, and I think it probably goes something like this: Have fun and bet on the longshot if it's money you'd never miss.

People will act perversely with small amounts of money, especially for the chance at a life changing amount.

Will I buy a dollar lottery ticket? Occasionally. I'd probably be making more of a social contribution by handing that dollar to a street person, but the chance for a life changing amount of money might be worth a dollar.

Please note, the use of the word "chance" in the previous argument is misleading and only a poor example. Buying a lottery ticket does not significantly increase your odds of winning.