Logic vs. Emotion in Decision-Making 40
deliasee writes "Researchers at Princeton have announced the results of a brain imaging study showing that a battle between different logical and emotional sectors of the brain results in a decision. The study used a game theory scenario to investigate why people often make irrational decisions that actually go against their most logical best interests - as in, I would like to get _some_ money as opposed to _no_ money."
i'm confused.... (Score:1)
Re:i'm confused.... (Score:3, Informative)
Now, if the person with $10 offers $1 to the other, both people "win" - person A is up $9, person B is up $1. So, it would be logical for person B to accept the offer.
In most cases, though, person B will reject the offer - as it seems unfair for him to be only getting a small amount. S/He rejects the offer, even though it means BOTH people get nothing.
So, it's a nice illustration of rational
Re:i'm confused.... (Score:2)
Re:i'm confused.... (Score:1)
Re:i'm confused.... (Score:2)
Re:i'm confused.... (Score:1)
Re:i'm confused.... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, it's a nice illustration of rational vs. irrational thought.
I don't think it's that clearcut. In our normal lives you often have transactions where you will never interact with the same person again, but by punishing bad actors you often get them to behave better in future transactions. The punishing them costs you more than just ignoring bad actor, but you accept that for everyone you bust and spend time dealing with someone that was going to harm you in the future is being punished for harming someone else.
The way I understand this expirement was run was that each person got to either make 10 offers to 10 different people, or accept/reject 10 offers from 10 different people. On average the least punishing player will end up with the most money of all the people accepting and rejecting offers. But I bet you would also notice that in a egaliterian society (small democratic republic say) the split will be 1:1 and they will have near the highest total payout. In a broken society the split will be more like 1:4 in favor of the offerers, and many transactions will be rejected. Here the least punising receiver will have much more money than the most punishing, unlike in the egaliterian society where the income inbalance will be small. Since they didn't write about this in the article I think the expirementers really don't understand what they are dealing with, or the reporter is just clueless.
If they are right about a considerable emotional component it is probably just rightous indignation, something you might need in order to overcome the rational thought that you can get the most money by leaving the punishment to others. There is a bit of a prisoners dilema though, because if everyone else does the same thing you will get a smaller payoff next time, and no matter what they did you have betrayed another receiver so there would also be the emotion of guilt for your evil dead. There would be less guilt if you've been cheated much before, or if you get a low offer next time. This reinforces the brokeness in broken societies, conversely a fair offer next time will reenforce good feelings about a previous punishing round.
It sort of makes sense that this is acts as an emotion and not just on the rational level. Presumably we developed the emotional part of the brain before we got rational, and this kind of skill would be needed for any social group large enough to have strangers. Not having "a conscience" might be what restricts some of our primate cousins to small groups, they are restricted to group sizes where the possibility of developing a bad reputation is enough to keep actors in line. (Possibly it's just bad government
Still I'm not convinced, memory lights up all over the brain, and you would be remembering previous times you were cheated when considering not punishing the bad actor, i.e. cheating yourself. The emotion they measure might be just a side effect of accessing memory associated with being cheated and hence associated with feeling rotten or angry.
Whats emotions then? (Score:1)
Your reasoning that "I wont allow myself to be cheated" is based on reasoning of past experiences and social logic is sound - and means that this emotion is actually reason-based. I agree.
But, then, "most" emotions can be explained by reason and logic. Love is nothing but an act with purpose correlating with survival/reproduction of
Re:Whats emotions then? (Score:2)
I haven't really thought about this with the brain in mind. My guess is that there is a rational basis for our emotions. Some which, at least, we reasoned through in early childhood or learned through conditioning. But for the most part they are ha
Re:i'm confused.... (Score:2)
hold your horses! not so fast. Lets think about this. We've defined rationality in terms of the aquisition of material gain, in this case, money and we've defined that doing things to satisfy emotional impulses are irrational. However, if we are really to look at rationality in the way that economists say they look at rationality we should all see the problem here. The rationality in economics is a kind of instrumental rationality. You have a
Re:i'm confused.... (Score:2)
It turns out that the second player somtimes rejects the offer, even if it's in his or her best interest to accept.
Re:i'm confused.... (Score:4, Informative)
Basically, two random individuals are put in a situation with a few ground rules (one being that this is the only time these two people will play this game together)
Person A is then allowed to offer person B a portion of $10; if person B accepts, person A gets to keep the remainder of the $10; if person B rejects the offered money, neither of them get any of the money.
The article is saying that people tend to reject low offers (like $1) since obviously, they want at least $5 of the money, and see less than that as unfair.
Re:i'm confused.... (Score:4, Interesting)
If Player B is rational, he will always accept any non-zero sum of money. However, in practice, Player B's often refuse to accept if the split is too much in Player A's favor. Thus the emotional response (punishing Player A for lack of fairness) often ends up overcoming the logical response (taking some money over no money).
There's also a related game called the dictator game. The setup is the same, but Player B must always accept. A rational Player A should always keep all the money for himself; however, in practice, the split often gives at least some money to Player B.
Re:i'm confused.... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is assuming that keeping A from getting any money has no value to Player B. If it's worth a buck to Player B to say, "Fuck you!" to Player A, then the line isn't that clear.
The behavior isn't necessarily irrational, it's just that there are non-monetary results that still have value to the players.
I would like to get _some_ money as... (Score:2)
Obviously this test wasn't conducted in Santa Cruz.
Slashdot way behind on this (Score:1)
Based on Principle. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Based on Principle. (Score:2)
That's not really an analog. The value/price should always be positive even with monopoly pricing, if it didn't generate more value than you are giving up in the purchase it's irrational to buy. Also if the average value/price ratio is 20:1 then it makes no sense to buy something that has a 5:1 value/price ratio while the other options are on the market. It would be like buying a government bond at 0.5% yield
Limits of simple GT scenarios (Score:2, Interesting)
However it is only rational to take $1 if you are absolutely sure that:
1) You will not be doing business with the other person again
2) People won't find out you're a loser.
And yes, the experiments I guess explicitly presupposes that 1) and 2) are true, but the brain probably says "Who am I to trust t
Re:Limits of simple GT scenarios (Score:2)
The situation is too artificial for the brain to take seriously.
Or maybe it's just that emotion takes over before the brain has a chance to think.
After all, the situation isn't as artificial as you make it out to be. The phrase "cut off your nose to spite your face" didn't come from nowhere, after all.
Re:Limits of simple GT scenarios (Score:2)
Re:Limits of simple GT scenarios (Score:2)
In other words, you might sit here and logically think that you'd take even a penny if someone offered it to you.... But if faced with the actual situation, you'd probably be thinking "dude, that suc
Re:Limits of simple GT scenarios (Score:2)
These guys have the fancy equipment and did the brainscans, so I can't credibly argue with 'em. Nevertheless, my guess would have been that's it's not so simple. Accepting the offer could just as easily be an emotional "Whoopee! I get a free dollar!" vs rejecting the offer with a cold, calculated "I j
Reloaded? (Score:1)
David Hume on the helix of passion/reason. (Score:2, Informative)
Hume
[utm.edu]
figured that out more then 200 years ago.
Why is science always the last to figure things out?
Re:David Hume on the helix of passion/reason. (Score:1, Informative)
Because saying "this is how things are" is a lot easier than telling yourself that and then actually constructing an experiment to prove/disprove it and then getting the funding to execute that experiment. Lets not even get into how you go about getting it published in a respectable journal. It's something like a patent search in that you've got to try to find all the references for the trivial things you proved in a day and forgot about even doubting in
In a related story... (Score:4, Funny)
What is rational? What isn't? (Score:2)
Look, when you weigh up what to do next (and I don't necessarily mean consciously) you can imagine that you're averaging your benefit minus cost to yourself over a period of time. If that time (call it T) is long then that's called 'rational'. If that time is short 'irrational'.
So what's the optimal time? Make that time long and you won't even be alive. But what's the standard by which you make a judgement about T? You can't use the
Real story: Researchers are cheap bastards. (Score:4, Interesting)
Fighting over ten bucks? If I was offered nine I'd turn it down just to watch the researcher wet his pants over the bad data point.
Now, if it were a thousand bucks, and I was offered a hundred -- that's about a good dinner out -- yeah, I'd take it if I wasn't in a bad mood. But if I were feeling surly or pissed-off, I might refuse it just to make the other guy suffer too.
A million and I'm offered a hundred thousand? It doesn't matter what my mood is, I take the money. Other Joe's got nine-hundred thousand? Who cares, I got my cash!
Moral of the story: Trying to prove things on the cheap doesn't work.
re: Real story: Researchers are cheap bastards (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference between a buck and a thousand becomes qualitative in addition to quantitative because those extra few orders of magnitude can change your life. That's not irrational.
Would I risk my home to invest in a double or nothing bet that I had a 55% chance of winning? No. Even though the odds are in my favor, the downside is too ugly. Someone in a less expensive part of the world, or with
What are emotions (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, the game theory model may be flawed here. If, for some people, seeing someone who has slighted them be unsatisfied is pleasurable, than it has a value. If that value is greater than $1, then it is a rational decision for them to choose not to accept the deal. The game theory model assumes that the pleasure of that has no value, however, and is thus an inaccurate model.
And yes, I do think money is a reasonable measure of value, so long as you accept that there are some things (Being punched in the face) with a value of $0, and some things (Not having to shoot your sister in the head) that are worth an infinite amount of money.
Re:What are emotions (Score:3, Interesting)
There's another side of the story, though: the question of whethe
Re:What are emotions (Score:2, Interesting)
The real problem I see with my claim is that there's an unfortunate circularity to it. If every decision can be modeled as a judgment, then there is no such thing as an irrational decision - merely one with a different valuation than we would use. Thus begins a headlong s
Depends on the social circumstances... (Score:2)
The title of this topic is kind of misleading, since there is logic underlying both decisions. I thought it was going to be about stuff like Antonio Damasio's research (see his book Descartes Error for more) that shows when someone's emotional centers in the brain
Financial consultant job:Behavioral researchers... (Score:2)
If there was an offer to use the Alpha processor in an Amiga in the early days or to just stay with Motorola's 68000, which would you choose?
Thought so, but then you're not C Inc.
Irrational processes (Score:2)
One day, the technical types will figure even the most unpredictable process of all - the mind of a girfriend.