From the moral to the neural: brain scans, decision-making, and the problematization of economic (ir)rationality

ABSTRACT

Advances in brain imaging techniques have opened new fields of investigation and often challenged conventional assumptions concerning human behaviour. This ‘neuromolecular gaze’ [Rose, N. & Abi-Rached, J. (2013) Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ] also heralds new ways of intervening in the regulation of social phenomena, based on the objectification of the cerebral processes that underlie individual conducts. Neuroeconomics applies this brain-centric perspective to the study of economic decision-making. This paper engages with the two dominant approaches in neuroeconomics. The first section concentrates on the work of Paul Glimcher, who considers economic models and their correlative notion of ‘utility maximization’ as providing the neurosciences with a theoretical framework as to how the brain solves decision problems. The second section discusses the findings of behavioural neuroeconomics, which attempts to model departures from the rationality axiom by measuring the cognitive and emotional biases that have their sources in the brain’s complex architecture. Whereas both strands of neuroeconomics rely on a benchmark of economic rationality, this paper argues that they reformulate in allegedly neutral neuroscientific terms a behavioural norm that is basically moral in nature. If rational decision-making conditions economic and indeed evolutionary survival, and yet if most people regularly fail as utility optimizers, then understanding the neural causes of such failures should help people better themselves and behave as good homines œconomici.

KEYWORDS:

• Rationality
• economics
• experiments
• governmentality
• bodies

Acknowledgement

Research leading to this paper was conducted while the author was Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine at King’s College London. The author wishes to express his gratitude to Professor Nikolas Rose for his guidance and insightful comments on the first draft of this paper. He also wishes to thank his colleagues Sam McLean and Frédéric Mercure-Jolette, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for their patient reading of the manuscript and their useful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Société et Culture [grant number 148069].