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In fact, what the experimenters discovered was precisely the opposite. In this study, recently published by the prestigious magazine Science,12 people actually accepted more unfair offers!13 In short, when the so-believed rational part of the brain is deactivated, people tend to favor rational choices.14

These results force us to confront our tendency to build artificial boxes and create conceptual dichotomies. This trend is a by-product of our desire to categorize things such that each has a unique and specific function. We may think of emotions and rationality as two separate things, but the brain, a complex dynamical system, seems not to work this way.

Neuroscience can certainly bring us to a better understanding of decision-making processes. The two UG experiments described earlier provide information that could never have been obtained without the union of neuroscience and economics; the former brought the methods, while the latter provided the framework. I also believe that we have embarked on a new scientific path that could lead us to a serious rethinking of the ways we have conceptualized emotion and rationality for decades—a rethinking that could seriously impact our daily lives.

FROM LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS TO DECISIONS IN EVERYDAY LIFE

One way to ensure the scientific and social development of neuroeconomics is to move from laboratory experiments to field studies of decision making in everyday life. Indeed, most neuroeconomics experiments have thus far been performed in isolation from the real world, where people—usually college students—are stuck in fMRI scanners and have to make very simple decisions. Furthermore, in most of these experiments, they are making decisions about money they cannot lose; because university rules do not allow students to lose their own money during experiments, the only money they can lose is the amount that we researchers give them to participate in our experiments. Anyone watching our work from outside the scientific perspective might wonder about its practical relevance.

I share this concern to a certain extent because I am aware that, for all neuroscience’s usefulness in furthering an understanding of individual human behavior and decision making, the brain, on its own, is rather useless. After all, people are not solely their brains. And their behavior is not just the output of their brains in action. Rather, they are made up of brains encased in bodies that are evolving in a physical environment, interacting with confederates, constrained by their past, and driven by the goals they have set that could become their future, not to mention the more or less explicit social demands they have to cope with.15 Indeed, an individual’s personality, behavior, and decisions emerge from countless interactions and coordination patterns occurring at myriad levels ranging from brain cells discharging to people talking to each other. And experiments performed in labs simply cannot account for all these parameters.

Cognizant of these limitations, some scientists are now moving beyond the laboratory to perform exciting new experiments. This has been made possible by the development of alternatives to existing brain imaging techniques, which are very expensive. In fact, the brain has many ways of letting us know how it reacts to or processes a situation. Eye movements, pupil dilations, heartbeats, skin-conductance data, and facial expressions are among the many “external” signs that can be used to accurately assess brain dynamics as people interact with the environments of their daily lives.

In situ neuroeconomics has actually already happened. In 2007, John Coates, a former Wall Street trader turned neurophysiologist at Cambridge University, ran live experiments on the trading floor of a bank located in London. Analyzing the hormonal levels of traders during their day of work, he determined over a period of several days how these levels fluctuated with the traders’ financial performance and the volatility of the market.