The shortsighted brain: Neuroeconomics and the governance of choice in time

Abstract

The young field of neuroeconomics converges around behavioral deviations from the model of the human being as Homo economicus, a rational actor who calculates his choices to maximize his individual satisfaction. In a historical moment characterized by economic, health, and environmental crises, policymakers have become increasingly concerned about a particular deviation for which neuroeconomics offers a biological explanation: Why do humans value the present at the expense of the future? There is contentious debate within the field over how to model this tendency at the neural level. Should the brain be conceptualized as a unified decision-making apparatus, or as the site of conflict between an impetuous limbic system at perpetual odds with its deliberate and provident overseer in the prefrontal cortex? Scientific debates over choice-making in the brain, we argue, are also debates over how to define the constraints on human reason with which regulative strategies must contend. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, we explore how the brain and its treatment of the future become the contested terrain for distinct visions of governmental intervention into problems of human choice-making.

How has neuroscience affected lay understandings of personhood? A review of the evidence

“…The expansion of the neuroscientific research programme to topics of acute social concern has raised neuroscience’s profile in society, propelling it into the public sphere. Neuroscience has been appropriated by many diverse fields that see it as relevant to their own interests, including law (Walsh, 2011), marketing (Chancellor and Chatterjee, 2011), public policy (Seymour and Vlaev, 2012), education (Ansari et al, 2012), parenting (O’Connor and Joffe, 2012) and economics (Schüll and Zaloom, 2011). …”

Workfulness: governing the disobedient brain

“…By locating the problem of choices in the biological substrate of the human brain, decision-making is not seen as a conscious act of reason but, rather, as preconscious processes. The neuroeconomic perspective thus modifies the principle of utility maximization by incorporating the role of emotions and impulses as causes for human behavior (Fiske andTaylor 2008, Dow Schüll andZaloom 2011). The prominent neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has specifically argued that decision-making depends on biological drives and emotions (2006).…”

Problem Gambling

“…As a socio-cultural discourse, problem gambling is one component of a spectrum of heterogeneous gambling behaviours distributed through the population influenced by a wide variety of factors ranging from the type of game being played, where it is being played, who is playing it and why they are playing it (Reith, 2007;Strong, 2011). It is fair to say that a medical model has dominated problem gambling research and regulatory discourses of gambling since the classification of pathological gambling as a disorder of impulse control in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) (American Psychiatric Association, 1980) (for critiques of the medical model in relation to gambling, see Castellani, 2000;Cosgrave & Klassen, 2001;Reith, 1999Reith, , 2007Schüll & Zaloom, 2011;Young, 2010). More recently, neurobiological and psychological investigations of "problem gambling" have examined the neurological and behavioural changes that occur in the etiology of gambling as a "pure" addiction (Shaffer, 1989).…”