CHOICE ANGST AND NEUROECONOMICS

Over at Radio Lab, a smart and innovative public-radio programme, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich have been busily examining any number of our idle preoccupations in thoughtful ways. But one recent show stood out, largely because it dovetails with the yuppie zeitgeist: Choice, the emotions and logic that inform our decisions (and which often lead us to rue them).

Like the behavioural economics publishing craze, books more plainly about decision-making have wide appeal, largely because we all love reading about what makes us tick (particularly if we could tick a bit better).

Not long ago, I proposed to Abumrad that our popular fixation with the subject of choice is a consequence of living in a time of unprecedented prosperity (which remains true, despite this recession). With so many options--particularly among the privileged public-radio set--the consequences of a bad decision feel more profound. We have only ourselves to blame.

He was not convinced, and e-mailed the following:

I don't think choice angst results from self blame. I think it has to do with the more basic, hidden cost of saying no. We're not wired to say No. If you're a caveman and you happen upon two piles of melons, you take them both. But here we are, with hundreds of berries and melons and cantaloupe and apple-pears and strange chilean fruit available to us, and any choice we make necessarily means saying no to a hundred others. And there's a psychic cost to that. The no's stay in the room. They foul up the experience of the thing you said yes to. Everything is a little less special when you could have easily gone with something else.

This, of course, is why men and women in cities tend to stay single for longer; all those piles of melons, so to speak. Still, the anxieties he describes about the lingering, malingering "No's" are often what that lead to self-blame and despair (ie, we're both right).

Jonah Lehrer, boy wonder and Radio Lab contributor, recently published "How We Decide", an engaging book about the cognitive battle behind every choice we make. In e-mail, he also weighed in on the suddenly popular pull of so-called neuroeconomics:

Modern neuroscience has always been interesting--it's fun to know how the brain makes your reality--but it's also been pretty useless, at least from a practical perspective. I mean, neuroscience has been spectacularly ineffective at creating new drugs (the most effective drugs, like Prozac, were designed by accident) and it's always been rather tough to draw direct connections between most of its experimental paradigms (like shocking a sea slug to test its memories) and real human experience.

I think neuroeconomics is really the first big foray of neuroscience into everyday life. It's a scientific branch dedicated to drawing practical connections between what's happening in your head and the cereal aisle in the supermarket. (Of course, neuroeconomics couldn't exist if we hadn't spent decades studying sea slugs, rats and disassociated neurons. It builds on all the previously "useless" knowledge.) But it's that immediate practicality, I think, that is responsible for the allure of decision-making research. It's not just about deconstructing our senses, or studying spike potentials, or some synaptic protein: it's about what happens when you buy into a stock market bubble, or get mad when someone treats you unfairly, or get tricked by a car salesman.

Practical applications for decision-making research are still up for grabs (and tend towards the paternalistic, policy-wise). Though I admire this clever new bit of "choice architecture" from Mac: an application called "Freedom", which disables networking for up to eight hours, enabling (self-imposed) freedom "from the distractions of the internet".

~ EMILY BOBROW

Picture credit: jepoirrier (via Flickr)