Neuroeconomics, Judgment, and Decision Making (Frontiers of Cognitive Psychology)

This volume explores how and why people make judgments and decisions that have economic consequences, and what the implications are for human well-being. It provides an integrated review of the latest research from many different disciplines, including social, cognitive, and developmental psychology; neuroscience and neurobiology; and economics and business.

The book has six areas of focus: historical foundations; cognitive consistency and inconsistency; heuristics and biases; neuroeconomics and neurobiology; developmental and individual differences; and improving decisions. Throughout, the contributors draw out implications from traditional behavioral research as well as evidence from neuroscience. In recent years, neuroscientific methods have matured, beyond being simply correlational and descriptive, into theoretical prediction and explanation, and this has opened up many new areas of discovery about economic behavior that are reviewed in the book. In the final part, there are applications of the research to cognitive development, individual differences, and the improving of decisions.

The book takes a broad perspective and is written in an accessible way so as to reach a wide audience of advanced students and researchers interested in behavioral economics and related areas. This includes neuroscientists, neuropsychologists, clinicians, psychologists (developmental, social, and cognitive), economists and other social scientists; legal scholars and criminologists; professionals in public health and medicine; educators; evidence-based practitioners; and policy-makers.

Evan A. Wilhelms is a PhD candidate in the Department of Human Development at Cornell University, and the Laboratory Leader in Dr. Valerie Reyna’s Laboratory for Rational Decision Making. His research is on the topics of judgment and decision making, with implications for financial and health well-being in adolescents and adults. His work has appeared in the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy and Virtual Mentor: American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, as well as several edited volumes.

Valerie F. Reyna is Professor of Human Development and Psychology at Cornell University, Co-Director of the Cornell University Magnetic Resonance Imaging Facility, Co-Director of the Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research, and Past President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. Her research encompasses human judgment and decision making, numeracy and quantitative reasoning, risk and uncertainty, medical decision making, social judgment, and false memory.