Better Than Conscious?: Decision Making, the Human Mind, and Implications for Institutions (Strungmann Forum Reports) Engel, Christoph and Singer, Wolf

Engel, Christoph and Singer, Wolf

ISBN 10: 0262195801 / ISBN 13: 9780262195805

Edité par Mit Pr, 2008

A propos de cet article

Better Than Conscious?: Decision Making, the Human Mind, and Implications for Institutions (Strungmann Forum Reports) In deutscher Sprache. pages.

N° de réf. du vendeur BN92331

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Better Than Conscious?: Decision Making, the Human Mind, and Implications for Institutions (Strungmann Forum Reports) Engel, Christoph and Singer, Wolf
• Éditeur: Mit Pr
• Date de parution: 2008
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0262195801
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780262195805
• Reliure: Couverture rigide
• État de l'article: gut
• Poids: 2000 grammes

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

Experts discuss the implications of the ways humans reach decisions through the conscious and subconscious processing of information.

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, however, come at a price: the ability to process information consciously is severely limited and conscious decision makers are liable to hundreds of biases. Measured against the norms of rational choice theory, conscious decision makers perform poorly. But if people forego conscious control, in appropriate tasks, they perform surprisingly better: they handle vast amounts of information; they update prior information; they find appropriate solutions to ill-defined problems.

This inaugural Strüngmann Forum Report explores the human ability to make decisions, consciously as well as without conscious control. It explores decision-making strategies, including 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 is at four levels—neural, psychological, evolutionary, and institutional—and the discussion is extended to the definition of social problems and the design of better institutional interventions. The results presented differ greatly from what could be expected under standard rational choice theory and deviate even more from the alternate behavioral view of institutions. New challenges emerge (for example, the issue of free will) and some purported social problems almost disappear if one adopts a more adequate model of human decision making.

À propos de l?auteur

Christoph Engel is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn, and a member of the Faculty of Law and Economics at the University of Bonn. He is the author of Generating Predictability: Institutional Analysis and Design and other books.

Wolf Singer is Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and Founding Director of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and the Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience in cooperation with the Max Planck Society, where he is also Senior Research Fellow. He is the coauthor of Beyond the Self: Conversations between Buddhism and Neuroscience (MIT Press).

Robert Boyd is Professor of Anthropology at University of California at Los Angeles.

Peter Dayan is Professor and Director of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London.

Tania Singer is Director of the Department of Social Science at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig.

Jeffrey R. Stevens is Assistant Professor of Psychology and a faculty member of the Center for Brain, Biology, and Behavior at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Peter J. Richerson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London. He is the author of Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution.

Paul W. Glimcher is Associate Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at the Center for Neural Science, New York University.

Christoph Engel is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn, and a member of the Faculty of Law and Economics at the University of Bonn. He is the author of Generating Predictability: Institutional Analysis and Design and other books.

Mark Lubell is Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis.