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March 13, 2007
Neuroeconomics
I was introduced to a new interdisciplinary field on the news last night, Neuroeconomics. (I guess it's not all that new - when I googled it, there were 464,000 hits - but it was new to me.) The news program focused on shopping, and on how different centers in the brain become activated when different types of consumer decisions are made. The story was about how neuroscientists can predict what we will buy before we know it ourselves. It looks at how consumers weigh factors such as cost and product desirability. And of course the logical extension is that businesses can then manipulate consumers to buy their own products.
Click here to go to the website for the Center for the Study of Neuroeconomics at George Mason University.
It says: "The Center for the Study of Neuroeconomics(CSN) at George Mason University is a research center and laboratory dedicated to the experimental study of how emergent mental computations in the brain interact with the emergent computations of institutions to produce legal, political, and economic order." This definition sounds much more benign than the manipulative scenario spun out on the news.
According to the Center's website, "Neuroeconomics is the study of how the embodied brain interacts with its external environment to produce economic behavior. Research in this field will allow social scientists to better understand individual decision making and consequently to better predict economic behavior." It contains a link (click here) to a 5 page pdf from the Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. I look forward to absorbing more about this field and considering its exciting and frightening implications.
Posted by hgroteva at March 13, 2007 9:52 AM | Society | Technology