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Neuroeconomics: Biotech Meets Economics
grimiore1 writes "The Economist has a story today introducing the concept of Neuroeconomics, which uses brain scanning technology and neuroscience to create new economic models and theories."
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When we truly understand the mind, will we really need an economy? Cognitive science is a field I find myself interested in. As such, I've often pondered what society will do when we've unlocked the secrets of the mind. Now I know...
How can the greedy be phased out? How much does one man need?
Interestingly, the guys doing the 'cash your paycheck now' seem to have already tapped into this insight.
Even people who need the cash now would often be better off just telling their landlord they'd be late - yet these check-cashing places (that do almost exactly that $100 now vs $115 in a week) do well.
Wonder how they figured this out without brain scanning? :)
I don't really think so. All that they really are doing is showing that our thought processes are largely governed by our desire to survive. By increasing the amount of money, the researchers pretty much told the subjects minds that they are being more successful in their environment -- just a positive feedback system increasing survival chances of the subject. I dunno, this research doesn't really prove anything.
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This work is valuable. The tradition of individual choice in economics has been pretty much based on two approaches until recently. The first approach has largely been one of a bunch of people saying to each other "this seems reasonable doesn't it?" and when enough of them answer "yep", it goes into the theory. The second approach is an attempt to be hardcore scientific and positivist, which basically meant you couldn't put anything in the theory which smacked of knowing how a person felt about anything.
Those two approaches balanced each other out OK, but it obviously leaves things incomplete. Experimental economics in general and neuroeconomics in particular takes things out of that purely thinking-about-it realm and starts to make it empirical. That's mighty cool.
On the other hand, the article was terribly lax in what it considered economics. "Economics" can cover a lot of ground, but reducing it to psychology or cognitive science is counterproductive. Economics is properly about interactions between people, often very large groups of people. Identifying what happens in someone's brain when they think about expected values--or even when they're playing a game with someone else--only tells you about the individual, not the system.
An important part of economics is in describing the individuals, who are usually treated as the "atoms" of an economic system. But economics is more importantly about what happens when you throw a lot of them together, which will still require a lot that you can't get from brainscans.
The pro-fmri bias is infuriating really.
The entire field of neuroscience is being slowly dragged into fMRI research because the money is there. And the money is there because brain pictures are pretty, so people who don't understand the underlying science are eager to throw money at the method. That's the really sad thing, an entire field of research is being corrupted because of aesthetics.
Every day valuable non-fMRI methodologies are thrown out the window in favor of crippled methods that are scannable because magnets are being built like Starbucks throughout the world. Inside a magnet, your experimental options are very limited compared to outside.
And for what? it's not as if knowing what part of the brain lights up tells you about how the brain is doing that thing. This article is an excellent example of the layperson naivete that feeds the fMRI cash-cow. Scientists have known about these failings of human decision making for many years. The idea that we are flawed at rational decision making is hardly news. But throw someone in a scanner, see part X light up and suddently we understand how the brain works?
Bollocks.
These imaging studies are useful yes, especially in the context of other things we know about what different parts of the brain do.
But they do not represent some bold (heh) new understanding of "neuroeconomics", which is just decision making theory and neuroscience given a fancy name.