As technology has opened new windows into the brain, it has revealed a great deal about what happens there when people make decisions about money. These revelations have given rise to a new field, called neuroeconomics. The field promises to answer both economic and emotional questions about behavior surrounding situations involving money — such as why people save, buy stocks, steal, and overspend. Interest in neuroeconomics has spread outward to many different fields — marketing, management, education, psychology, political science, and law — but it has also pulled the focus of many of these ... More

As technology has opened new windows into the brain, it has revealed a great deal about what happens there when people make decisions about money. These revelations have given rise to a new field, called neuroeconomics. The field promises to answer both economic and emotional questions about behavior surrounding situations involving money — such as why people save, buy stocks, steal, and overspend. Interest in neuroeconomics has spread outward to many different fields — marketing, management, education, psychology, political science, and law — but it has also pulled the focus of many of these fields inward, toward a common neurobiology that unites them. As a result, we have begun to learn that some fields' concerns are not as different as they have appeared to be. For example, the monetary concerns of economics and the emotional concerns of the mental health fields, on the surface, look very different. But when it comes to distinguishing the two, many neural circuits do not have a clue. Many of the fear circuits do not know if we are worried about stocks or terrorists. And most of the reward circuits do not know if we are picking up a paycheck or checking out an attractive face. This book provides a framework for evaluating certain aspects of good — or poor — judgment, providing a model for making sense of our evaluations, and showing how neuroeconomic methods will ultimately help us to recognize inconsistency in values, measure response to monetary risk and reward, discover more specific elements of response, and inject more sense into different concepts of good sense.