Christoph Engel and Wolf Singer (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780262195805
- eISBN:
- 9780262272353
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262195805.001.0001
- Subject:
- Psychology, Social Psychology
Conscious control enables human decision makers to override routines, to exercise willpower, to find innovative solutions, to learn by instruction, to decide collectively, and to justify their ...
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Conscious control enables human decision makers to override routines, to exercise willpower, to find innovative solutions, to learn by instruction, to decide collectively, and to justify their choices. These and many more advantages come, however, at a price. The ability to process information consciously is severely limited. Conscious decision makers are liable to hundreds of biases, yet measured against the norms of rational choice theory, they perform poorly. If they forego conscious control, in appropriate tasks, humans perform surprisingly better. This inaugural Strüngmann Forum Report explores the human ability to make decisions: consciously as well as without conscious control; deliberate and intuitive; explicit and implicit; processing information serially and in parallel; with a general-purpose apparatus or with task-specific neural subsystems. The analysis taken is at four levels—neural, psychological, evolutionary, and institutional—and discussion is extended to the definition of social problems and the design of better institutional interventions. The results presented differ greatly from what one expects under standard rational choice theory and deviate even more from the alternate behavioral view of institutions. Some purported social problems almost disappear if one adopts a more adequate model of human decision making. Yet new challenges emerge, in particular, that of free will.Less
Conscious control enables human decision makers to override routines, to exercise willpower, to find innovative solutions, to learn by instruction, to decide collectively, and to justify their choices. These and many more advantages come, however, at a price. The ability to process information consciously is severely limited. Conscious decision makers are liable to hundreds of biases, yet measured against the norms of rational choice theory, they perform poorly. If they forego conscious control, in appropriate tasks, humans perform surprisingly better. This inaugural Strüngmann Forum Report explores the human ability to make decisions: consciously as well as without conscious control; deliberate and intuitive; explicit and implicit; processing information serially and in parallel; with a general-purpose apparatus or with task-specific neural subsystems. The analysis taken is at four levels—neural, psychological, evolutionary, and institutional—and discussion is extended to the definition of social problems and the design of better institutional interventions. The results presented differ greatly from what one expects under standard rational choice theory and deviate even more from the alternate behavioral view of institutions. Some purported social problems almost disappear if one adopts a more adequate model of human decision making. Yet new challenges emerge, in particular, that of free will.
