Neuroeconomics Continued

Neuroeconomics (earlier discussed here) is one of the most promising sources of excuses for self-appointed experts to claim they know more about people's lives than the people living them. The most plausible of those excuses (that people use the more rational part of the brain when agreeing with experts) has just disappeared.

It looks like the demographic group most closely associated with really dumb decisions uses more of the brain while making them:

Surprisingly, behavioral scientists have actually done these interviews with hundreds of American adolescents. In order to explore really stupid behavior, they have asked what seem to be really stupid questions: Is it a good thing to set your hair on fire? Drink Drano? Go swimming where sharks swim?

The results are fascinating, and unsettling. While teenagers are just as likely as adults to get the answer right (the correct answer is “No”), teens actually have to mull the question over momentarily before they answer. As summarized by psychologists Valerie Reyna of Cornell and Frank Farley of Temple in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, teenagers take a split second longer than adults to reject such patently inane behaviors. And more of the teenage brain lights up, suggesting that they are actually going through some kind of deliberative calculation before concluding what the rest of us assume is obvious.

By the standards of neuroeconomics, clearly adolescents are superior at making decisions. The more radical neuroeconomists might even want to make self-destructive behavior compulsory.

Maybe that explains the two year dumb-off …

Neuroeconomic and Neurophysics

In the course of criticizing neuroeconomics, Arnold Kling briefly summarizes it as follows:

Some interpreters of neuroeconomics appear to argue that:

1. Individuals make decisions that are not "rational" by economic standards.

2. With new means to study the brain, we can show that these irrational decisions are correlated with greater usage of the emotional part of the brain.

3. Therefore, government paternalism is justified in steering people away from the decisions that are correlated with emotion and toward those decisions that are correlated with reason.

Since today's social sciences are about as firmly established as physics was in the day of Aristotle, maybe we can consider how Artistotle might have reacted to neuroscience studying people handling physical objects. If neurology existed back then and if it had been applied to people throwing objects, it would have found:

1. Individuals throw objects in ways that are not “rational” by the standards of Aristotelian physics.

2. With new means to study the brain, we can show that these irrational decisions are correlated with greater usage of the more primitive parts of the brain.

3. Therefore, government paternalism is justified in steering people away from the decisions that are correlated with instinct and toward those decisions that are correlated with reason.

We can imagine a government program to train people to throw objects the “rational” way, in straight lines instead swinging arms in circles. (Slings, of course, would be banned.) They might prohibit people from cooling soup by blowing on it. (Air is the hot, wet element and, of course, could not cool off anything.)

In retrospect, the above suggestions can be seen to be nonsensical. It takes reason a long time to find the truth. Why should we believe that current neuroeconomics has done so?

Come to think of it, the example of physics might show that once reason has hit upon the right approach, regulations become unnecessary. In the past few centuries, human beings have been handling physical objects using machines designed by human reason. There was no regulation passed commanding that.

Krupke, We've Got Troubles of Our Own

According to Classical Values, there's a renewed movement to base legal decisions on neurolaw:

Criminal law scholarship has recently become absorbed with the ideas of neuroscience in the emerging field of neurolaw. This mixture of cognitive neuroscience and law suggests that long established conceptions of human agency and responsibility are fundamentally at odds with the findings of science. Using sophisticated technology, cognitive neuroscience claims to be upon the threshold of unraveling the mysteries of the mind by elucidating the mechanical nature of the brain. Despite the limitations of that technology, neurolaw supporters eagerly suggest that those revelations entail that an inevitable and radical overhaul of our criminal justice system is soon at hand.

I think somebody should write a song about how, assuming human behavior is based on brain states instead of alleged reasons, appeals to experts can be gamed. After all, the expert advice is a type of human behavior and differing brains might produce differing advice.

Wait a moment… It's been done:

The trouble is he's crazy, the trouble is he drinks
The trouble is he's lazy, the trouble is he stinks
The trouble is he's growing, the trouble is he's grown
Krupke, we've got troubles of our own

Also see my earlier comments on neuroeconomics as well as Bryan Caplan's defense of free will.