BTW, the really latest cutting edge in all the experimental/behavioral econ stuff is to actually wire people up to brain scanners while the experiments are performed to see what parts of their brains are firing when they are thinking/ acting in certain ways. So, when people are being cooperative in prisoner's dilemma games, or are worrying about fairness in the ultimatum game, versus shafting their neighbors in a "gimme-it-all-now" mentality, which parts of the brain are engaged.
I am not sure what I think of all this, and very little of it has appeared in print, the major item a paper by Kevin McCabe and Vernon Smith and some other coauthors in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US) in 2001, but for what it is worth this vein of study is now being called neuronomics. Barkley Rosser
----- Original Message -----
From: andie nachgeborenen
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2003 11:26 PM
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Economics drivel
Bill Bartlett <billbartlett at enterprize.net.au> wrote:
At 12:55 AM -0700 10/6/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>It's probably a cognitive psychology effect rather than a social psychology one. Don't assumed that the social context is always the most important. There's a lot of our thinking that is very robust across all known social circumstances, probaly hard-wired in, so that atention to the social context is actually misleading.
Bill replied:
At one level that is true, but only part of the truth. Emotional reactions are hard wired, but precisely what stimulates them is sometimes learned. Not learned in the sense of deliberately training your brain to react in a certain way, but often just induced as a result of some experience or set of experiences.
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I didn't maen to dent that. By hard wired I didn't mean unchangeable,a lways happens that way no mater what, but exhibits a string tendency that ius fairly independent of training and social circumstances. But you can affect any human reaction consciously or unconsciously, defeat it, twist it, change it into something else.
> The endowment effect is probably a very good example of this. Also along these lines: cognitive dissonance and the related phenomenon of sour grapes (adaptive preference formation, or "I do not want what I have not got"), and various other things usefully explored by Jon Elster in his books on the social implications of cognitive spychology, Sour Grapes, Ulysses and the Sirens, and other books jks
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Bill:
> Feel free to explain his theories to me at any time. I'm fascinated by that sort of thing.
jks. A tall order in the abstract. But if (as is often the case) a concrete application arises, I'll mention it.
Bill But all I'm saying is that human motivations are very complex, way more complex than is credited by simply asserting that people's brains are wired to react that way.
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Agreed that to say, People are Just Like That is not an explanation. What's interesting, though, is identifying very specific patterns of thought that recur pretty constatntly (unless overridden, defeated, or trained out of you), and showing their scope and efficacy in concrte contexts that matter. That's what Kahneman won the Nobel prize for doing.
Maybe someone with access to the appropriate internet libraries can post a K & T paper link, so people can see what all the shouting is about.
jks
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