Irrational Economist_ Making Decisions in a Dangerous World - Erwann Michel-Kerjan [45]
10
The Useful Brain
How Neuroeconomics Might Change Our Views on Rationality and a Couple of Other Things
OLIVIER OULLIER
Humans love boxes.
By boxes, I mean anything from a folder to a mental category that is supposed to facilitate our lives.
Think about the hard drive of your computer. Don’t you have a bunch of folders for personal items—where you store digital photos of people you love and work-related documents? Or a “to-do list” with an “urgent things to be taken care of” column and a “not so urgent” one next to it?
In addition to the physical (and electronic) ones, there are all these mental boxes we rely on.1 We use them to categorize and classify our thoughts (important, or not), emotions (happiness, sadness), opinions (interesting, boring), and even people we know (relative, friends, colleagues).
Whether we admit it or not, we are box-dependent.
But there is a downside to this habit. Whenever categorization enters the game, the ghost of simplification rears its head and dichotomies that are not supposed to exist are artificially created. And science has always constituted a fertile ground for artificial dichotomies to emerge and persist, sometimes forever.
Think about the rationality versus emotion debate that motivates this book (two quite time-resistant boxes, as discussed in the Introduction). As stimulating and interesting as this debate can be, we have been walking in circles for ages and some fresh insights could definitely come handy.
But what if there were no such things as emotion on the one hand and rationality on the other?
SHAKING THE (IR)RATIONALITY TREE: WELCOME TO “EMO-RATIONALITY”
Given our current state of knowledge in the behavioral and brain sciences, I tend to favor the following proposition, not as an economist but as a neuro-scientist:
The dichotomy between rational and affective decision making may be an artificial construction of our minds to help us categorize our choice behavior. From what we know so far, our brain does not seem to generate emotions and rationality in an independent fashion. Rather, it might be dealing with a complementary pair, a kind of “emo-rationality.”
This perspective, which has recently gained acceptance in the brain sciences,2 still remains bizarre for (too) many economists. If confirmed, however, it could have a major impact on economics, markets, and public policy. This is why, over the past decade, I—and a number of colleagues3—have become increasingly interested in the following question: How can the joint study of behavior and brain dynamics help economics and other social sciences take a more realistic approach to understanding decision-making processes?
THE CURIOUS CASE OF PHINEAS GAGE
The emo-rationality idea—although to my knowledge never before formulated this way—has a history.
It might have started in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Phineas Gage, a railroad construction worker, suffered a terrible accident that would change forever not only his life but also our understanding of the way emotions affect social behavior.
On September 13, 1848, somewhere near Cavendish, Vermont, Gage was the leader of a team of men who were blasting rocks with powder in preparation for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad. Suddenly, an uncontrolled explosion sent a three-foot, seven-inch, thirteen-and-a-half-pound, quarter-inch-diameter iron rod through his forebrain. Literally. The rod not only penetrated the skull under the left cheekbone but went all the way up through his brain before landing some thirty yards away.
Phineas Gage survived despite the fact that a large portion of his forebrain was missing (or at least severely damaged)—an injury that would have disrupted the dense reciprocal information exchange between the frontal lobe and deeper areas of his brain. Dr. John Martyn Harlow, a local physician thanks to whom we know so much about the case since he wrote