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Science

Logic vs. Emotion in Decision-Making 40

Posted by michael from the seeing-red dept.
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."
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Logic vs. Emotion in Decision-Making More

Logic vs. Emotion in Decision-Making

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  • I'm not much into game theory, hence I'm a little lost on this ultimatum game described in the article. Could someone who knows something about it speak up?

    • Re:i'm confused.... (Score:3, Informative)

      by ceejayoz ( 567949 )
      Basically, one person has $10 and the other has $0. The person with $10 has to offer money to the other person.

      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
      • It seems rational to me. You are punishing the other player for antisocial behavior, by accepting a short-term loss to encourage better behavior in the long run.

      • Re:i'm confused.... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by zenyu ( 248067 ) on Friday June 13, 2003 @09:38PM (#6196733)

        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 :) I wonder if bonobos treat strangers better than other chimps...)

        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.
        • Your reply was insightful, and reflected a great deal of reflection (sorry for the choice of words) on your part regarding the behavior of people. But I have something to add.

          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
          • So then....what are emotions??? I would say emotions are only rational behavior but with rationality hidden a little deeper non-obvious way. But we still call them emotions after all....so this ultimatum experiment's claim of this as an emotion is not incorrect.

            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
      • So, it's a nice illustration of rational vs. irrational thought.

        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

    • There are two players, and $10 that should be split between them. One player suggests how to split the $10. The other player may accept or reject the offer. If the other player accepts, each gets as much as the first player suggested. If he or she rejects, both get nothing.

      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)

      by melete ( 640855 ) on Friday June 13, 2003 @07:11PM (#6195997)
      You don't really need to understand game theory to get this application of it.

      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)

      by Chris Pimlott ( 16212 ) on Friday June 13, 2003 @07:43PM (#6196185)
      The ultimatum game has two players. Player A decides how to split up some amount of money (say $10) between the two players. Player B decides whether or not to accept. If he accepts, the money is divided accordin to the split Player A decided. Otherwise, no one gets any money.

      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)

        by mbogosian ( 537034 ) <matt@arenaun[ ]ited.com ['lim' in gap]> on Saturday June 14, 2003 @12:49AM (#6197468) Homepage
        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).

        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.
  • opposed to _no_ money.

    Obviously this test wasn't conducted in Santa Cruz.
  • I saw this [pbs.org] a couple weeks ago, on Scientific American Frontiers (or Alan Alda in Scientific American Frontiers, or Alan Alda Acts As Everyman or whatever they're calling it now), on PBS.

  • Based on Principle. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by saden1 ( 581102 )
    I make decisions based on principle. I try to stay away from doing business with companies I feel their vale/price ratio to be too high, but if their is absolutely no alternative the old adage of "you have to do what you have to do" applies. When it comes to web technology Iâ(TM)ll confesses and say I will absolutely stay away from anything M$. I mean what other choice does one have when they know M$ mission as far as the web is concerned is to control it all.

    • I try to stay away from doing business with companies I feel their vale/price ratio to be too high

      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
  • Some of these Game Theory scenarios do not include the bigger social picture. Sometimes it's rational to turn down a paltry offer and make it so that both loses, even when that could be seen as irrational.

    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

    • 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.

    • Those are really good points, and another is that we evolved as pack animals. It's tempting to speculate that being programmed to prevent hogs from benefiting, even to your own detriment, is a trait that helps the pack (and therefore its members) survive.

    • The evidence collected in the experiment wasn't the behavior of the participants. It was brain activity *correlated* with behavior. Their conclusions are that it appears that more primitive emotional portions of the brain are involved in overriding the advanced prefrontal regions when an unfair offer is made.

      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

      • And that is really what they're getting at - that the mechanism behind refusing (or disliking) an offer is a primitive emotional response, while the mechanism behind accepting a fair offer is one of logic.

        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

  • Did the researchers just watch Neo meet the Architect and make a choice? ;-)
  • [simons-rock.edu]
    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)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Why is science always the last to figure things out?

      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)

    by anthony_dipierro ( 543308 ) on Friday June 13, 2003 @08:17PM (#6196375) Journal
    9 out of 10 slashdotters said they would be willing to pay $1 to watch Bill Gates lose $9.
  • Irrational is merely rational in the short term - sometimes very short.

    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)

    by Eevee ( 535658 ) on Friday June 13, 2003 @09:53PM (#6196807)

    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.

    • Yup. Odds aren't all that is important. Logical best interests are often misrepresented. A buck isn't a thousand.

      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)

    by Snowspinner ( 627098 ) <{ude.lfu} {ta} {dnaslihp}> on Friday June 13, 2003 @10:45PM (#6196989) Homepage
    I admit, I'm somewhat curious how "emotion" is defined for the purpose of this study. At least some credible people, most notably Martha Nussbaum, claim that emotions are in fact a form of rational response, depending on a conscious judgment of value. When I am upset that my cat died, this emotion is based on the judgment that my cat was valuable to me, which is a rational decision, not an irrational one.

    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.
    • Well, not quite. Nussbaum et. al are talking about the question of the objective value of emotional response: things which bring you pleasure are, ipso facto, valuable, and things which cause you pain are, ipso facto, costly. That's certainly important and true -- and, all to often, neglected -- but it's not something terribly new. You can go back to Watson and the other Chicago behaviorists and still see that idea quite explicitly stated.

      There's another side of the story, though: the question of whethe
      • I may be remembering Nussbaum poorly here, but I'm fairly sure she makes a claim for a rational component to emotional response, or, at least, that emotional judgments cannot be distinguished from other judgments in terms of their process.

        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
  • The key difference is whether the cash offer is a one-time deal or not. People are more likely to accept even $1 if it is a one-time offer, but if the game is played in rounds and reputation can be a factor, then people turn it down more often.

    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
  • need not apply. They're as capable as Commodore Inc. I only say that because they're still considering the results as new info.

    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.
  • "Researchers at Princeton have announced the results of a brain imaging study showing ... a battle between different logical and emotional sectors of the brain...to investigate why people often make irrational decisions that actually go against their most logical best interests."

    One day, the technical types will figure even the most unpredictable process of all - the mind of a girfriend.

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