Neuroeconomics and Decapitation

source: Discover Magazine

I’ve been working with a good friend of mine who’s a neuropsychopharmacologist on a paper about some of the weird, inherent contradictions of the burgeoning field of neuroeconomics, which deals with the psychology of decision making. It’s a topic anthropologists have been interested in for a few years at least, but we’re taking a different angle: metaphorical versus technoscientific understandings of the brain. 

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Economic theory is by and large based on the idea of a rational actor, and economists’ mathematical models reflect the assumption that economic actors (i.e. humans) are rational, calculating, utility-optimizing agents. In other words, given a set of constraints in the world, we will always make decisions that make us happiest, in whatever time frame and social ramifications we’re able to consider (i.e. bounded rationality). 

Theoretically, that’s all well and good, but problems start to arise once you look at real people in the real world. People often make decisions that clearly aren’t in their best interest, which economists have tried to explain through behavioral economics, using a sort of dumbed down version of pop psychology to understand the human motivations of so-called irrational behavior. Basically, cognitive psychology was co-opted to explain away the discrepancies in economic models, which did little more than give them new life.

As behavioral economics and cognitive psychology converged, however, the idea of a rational actor (homo economicus) lost traction. Nonetheles enamored with formal models and pseudoscientific vocabularies, however, economists turned to neuroscience for both scientific credibility and a biological basis for rationality. Neuroeconomics, according to the Society for Neuroeconomics, is: 

...a nascent field that represents the confluence of economics, psychology and neuroscience in the study of human decision making.  Researchers from each of these disciplines have investigated decision making processes for many decades independently, with each discipline offering unique strengths.  Accordingly, neuroeconomics combines the rigorous modeling from economics with psychological studies of social and emotional influences on decision making, and utilizes tools from neuroscience that permit the observation of otherwise latent valuation and decision-making computations that take place in the brain.

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, neuroeconomists continue to conceptualize the brain as a two-part structure, similar to the left-side-of-the-brain versus right-side-of-the-brain we’re taught about in elementary school. This allows them to maintain a model of competition between a theoretically perfect rational actor (left side of the brain) and an irrational, intuitive actor (right side of the brain) that helps explain the discrepancies in otherwise “true” models of economic behavior and decision making. Of course, the argument is a bit more nuanced than that, but so-called irrational behavior is nevertheless seen as a deviation from the norm (i.e. the rational), the latter of which is explicitly defined by the mathematical models of classical economics.

Neuroscientists, of course, have called bullshit, very quickly pointing out that the brain is infinitely more complex than mathematical models of decision making can account for, and summarily dismissing the whole idea of a right-brain-versus-left-brain dichotomy, or any iteration thereof. They’re nevertheless forced into simplifying their models of neurophysiological circuitry in the same way economists have had to simplify their models of human socio-economic relationships. 

The real problem, though, goes beyond that. Whereas a neuroscientist sees the “brain” as a connected to the nervous system and, by extension, connected via its transmittance of sensory information to the outside world, economists have violently separated the brain from the rest of the body and its environment. Rather than taking a holistic view of decision making that neuroscience could help understand, neuroeconomics has located the capacity to choose solely in the brain, leaving no room for the incorporation of either internal or external stimulants. Their decapitation of the brain from the body, their excerption of the conscious mind from the environmental factors that constitute that very consciousness, does nothing more than to reinforce the classical economic notion of rationality despite the world, rather than the much more obviously true notion of rationality as a product of the messy, complicated worlds we actually live in. 

Behavioral psychology and neuroeconomics have a lot to contribute to anthropological debates on markets and marketization, and vice versa, but before those conversations can be productive, we have to move past these unscrupulous metaphors of the brain that reproduce inherited biases and assumptions toward understandings of the mind that help us grapple with the complexities of human decisions and values.