Burnt Orange Report

I'll see your berry-berry and raise you a John Kerry

By Jim Dallas

Newsweek has an enlightening article on behavioral economics, specifically dwelling on neurological investigations into the mechanics of rational decision-making:

Much of Glimcher's work is with monkeys...Monkeys, obviously, don't save for their retirements, and you couldn't expect them to grasp the rules of the ultimatum game. But they do have a rudimentary concept of economic choice, and researchers have discovered a medium of exchange—Berry Berry fruit drink—that can usefully stand in for money in a monkey's mental life. To illustrate how monkeys make economic decisions, Glimcher's former colleague Michael Platt, now at Duke, has investigated how they value status within their troop. Male monkeys have a distinct dominance hierarchy, and Platt has found they will give up a considerable quantity of fruit juice for the chance just to look at a picture of a higher-ranking individual. This is consistent with field observations, Platt says, which have found that social primates spend a lot of time just keeping track of the highest-ranking troop member. It isn't known exactly why monkeys do this, but the finding might help explain the behavior of human beings who pay $1,000 just to sit in a hotel ballroom with the president.

Economics is a pretty abstract science that is good at guessing what people will do in the aggregate over the long-haul (when rational decision-making tends to rise above the signal-to-noise ratio of daily life). The problem is, according to the behavioral scientists interviewed, that much of what is often dismissed as "noise" actually has a logic to it -- and understanding this will be a necessary part of enlightening people of their own self-interest.

This got me thinking about the applicability of this research to political science. Especially in the shadow of "rational choice" scholarship in poli-sci, economic theory increasingly finds itself applied to analysis of political decision-making, among government officials as well as among ordinary citizens.

I'd imagine that careful attention to this sort of research could help to explain why people don't vote. It might also suggest strategies for encouraging civic participation, reducing mistrust of government, and building more social cohesion.

Very important stuff indeed.