Strategizing in the Brain

摘要

Most economic theories minimize the influence of human emotions and assume that what people believe and choose follows rationality principles. Important principles include knowing how much of one valuable good is worth one unit of another; following the rules of probability in processing information; planning ahead; resisting temptation; and guessing accurately what others will do. These principles have proved useful as mathematical building blocks for devising aggregate theories of corporate and market behavior. An emerging field of study called "behavioral economics" takes advantage of dramatic advances in psychology and neuroscience. Behavioral economics replaces strong rationality assumptions with more realistic ones and explores their implications (1). A clear demonstration of how neural evidence contributes to behavioral economics is provided by Sanfey et al. on page 1755 of this issue (2). These investigators analyzed subjects with functional magnetic resonance imaging as they played the "ultimatum game," and correlated activity in certain brain areas with the cognitive and emotional processes involved in economic decision-making.