the neuroscience of economic behavior

As I've worked in research, my resistance to a lot of things has decreased. For example, my view of the morals of the pharmaceutical industry has become more nuanced and less negative. Similarly, taking money from DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to learn how the intention to move a limb is encoded seems ok to me, even though that research will ultimately probably be applied to some kind of prosthetic weaponry, either connected to the user or a remotely controlled robot-weapon. In part, I am sifting through the new moral universe in which I find myself, but in part I have learned enough to see the value in things I didn't value before.

That said, I'm really nervous about the study of neuroscience of economic behavior. A major application is advertising, understanding how people make decisions. Even when one has an intellectual knowledge of how and why sex, for example, sells, it's hard to resist. As we as scientists become more knowledgeable about the most basic decisions in the brain and become more knowledgeable about how to influence motivation, it seems that it will be even harder to resist the siren call of consumerism.

Here's an example of recent work ( caltech press release, pubmed entry) that on the face of it is warm and fuzzy. in the experiments, two subjects undergoing brain imaging repeatedly play a game in which trust is rewarded. they find that subjects risk increasing amounts as the game progresses.

"Neoclassical economics starts with the assumption that rational self-interest is the motivator of all our economic behavior," says Quartz. "The further assumption is that you can only get trust if you penalize people for non-cooperation, but these results show that you can build trust through social interaction, and question the traditional model of economic man."

"The results show that you can trust people for a fair amount of time, which contradicts the assumptions of classical economics," Camerer adds.

To me it suggests that people can be manipulated easily, building up their trust and then taking them for a big hit. This is supported by the large number of people who are swindled countless ways in confidence scams.

I suspect that my concern for the potential applications of this work may result primarily from the fact that I don't find most of the data intellectually interesting. I'm willing to deal with the devil to answer questions I think are important and compelling, but not for this.