Random thought on neuroscience and economics

As neuroimaging technologies become cheaper and more readily available to experimental game theorists at capable, yet modestly funded public universities, I expect increasingly close ties between behavioral economics and neuroscience, such that one day we may no longer distinguish between the two at all.

The convergence of behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience is a natural partnership. In recent decades, economists have had to face the facts that human behavior consistently deviates from the expectations of their rational actor models. Evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides helped to make this disparity intelligible, reframing the problem in a Darwinian, adaptationist logic: The basis of behavioral economics should not be rationality in action, but “rationality in design”.

To accept this principle was for behavioral economists an acknowledgment of a biological basis of human behavior. However difficult a pill this was to swallow, an evolutionary biological perspective offered something potentially invaluable to behavioral economists. The workhorse unit of measurement in microeconomics, utility, has only existed thus far as an abstraction. For the biologist, there is a physical record of utility in the form of genetic code and by extension physical and behavioral traits. This utility was truly experienced and had contributed to the successful life and reproduction of an organism; its genetic signature selected for preservation by natural selection.

The genetic signatures of behavioral traits are manifest as physical structures in the brain. The study of how cognition emerges from these structures is called neuroscience. Though neuroscientists study nervous systems generally and make use of opportunities to study all kinds of them, from simple manifestations like that of the nematode worm to the more complex variety of vertebrates, there is no mistake that the grand prize is the human brain. The human brain is a special brain in numerous regards, but perhaps none more so than in its capacity for socially interactive decision-making. Accordingly, for neuroscientists interested in the human brain, the study of social decision-making offers singular leverage on “the hard problem.” Quite serendipitously, social decision-making is the fundamental province of behavioral economics.

The similarities do not stop there. Like behavioral economics, neuroscience also makes regular use of laboratory controlled experiments using both human and non-human primates. Experiments frequently involve eliciting specific behaviors or activities on the part of the participant, whilst employing various invasive and non-invasive technologies to record physical processes taking place in the brain. Incorporation of the techniques of experimental economics, i.e. social exchange games, was primarily limited by the know-how required to conduct and interpret them. Their reward is a new window on the human brain, and in return for their cooperation economists acquire a physical quantity representing their holy grail of metrics, utility.