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For a brief time in January of 2007, after saving a fellow passenger from an oncoming subway train, Wesley Autrey, a New York City construction worker, was a national hero. "I had to make a split decision," he told The New York Times the next day. "I just saw someone who needed help. I did what I felt was right."
Four months later, following a whirlwind season of interviews, public receptions, and talk-show appearances, his rise to prominence culminated in quintessentially American fashion: as a contestant on the hit NBC game show Deal or No Deal. The show, which features twenty-five "spokesmodels" toting twenty-five money-laden briefcases containing amounts ranging from one cent to $1 million, is essentially a glorified guessing game: Contestants open several cases each round, removing the corresponding prizes from play. Go all the way to the last case and win what's inside.
Along the way, however, aspiring millionaires must reject a series of escalating buy-out offers from the show's host (an eerily glabrous Howie Mandel), a twist that results in much agonized hand-wringing and tension-fraught commercial breaks. The average contestant, it may be observed, stands to win something in the low six figures. Nearly all eventually take a settlement.
Autrey, whose episode aired the following May, played fearlessly, and fared much better than most. With only three cases remaining—$25, $10,000, and $1 million—he was offered a whopping $305,000 buy-out, a near-record, and only $33,000 less than the average of the remaining prizes. As Mandel leaned in and whispered the show's pivotal phrase, "Deal … or no deal," Autrey glanced at family members just offstage before delivering his answer: "No deal." Turning toward the models, he called for case number 14. The amount inside: $1 million. A collective groan issued from the audience. Autrey's relatives appeared visibly deflated. Once again, Autrey was offered a buy-out—$5,000, almost exactly the average of the two remaining values—but again declined. The last case opened, his own, contained $25.
"It was the risk, you know?" he said in an interview after the show, "just like the chance I took that day." But was it? Did the same quality that allowed Wesley Autrey to risk his own life for a stranger's make him squander a lucrative sure thing? What possessed him to take such a reckless chance, one that seems so very wrong to the rest of us? Are some people just born risk-takers, indifferent to chance, or is there something deep within all of us that drives us to gamble?
Those are just the kinds of questions that Scott Huettel is trying to answer. Huettel Ph.D. '99, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, is co-director of Duke's Center for Neuroeconomic Studies, a think tank for researchers interested in decision-making and the brain.
"I think there are actually two types of neuroeconomics," says Huettel, "and they don't always coexist very easily. One is trying to use neuroscience to understand particular types of decision-making: Can we understand why people might choose a riskier option over a safer option? Or why they might choose to give up some of their money to help someone else? Neuroscientists are very excited about this because it gives them a whole range of interesting questions.
"The other type would be: Can we use neuroscience data to alter economic policy? So if we have some theory about decision-making, or about some type of particular economic policy, can we use neuroscience to better help with that? And that direction is not always well accepted. There's more resistance to whether neuroscience data can really help change the way economists think at a deep level."
Neuroeconomics is what's typically referred to as an "emerging" discipline, a term that suggests, at least in part, a certain lack of unifying view. Like many cross-disciplinary endeavors, its boundaries are defined more by individual researchers than any set of canonical ideas, and so it tends to incorporate a multiplicity of methodologies and aims. As a result, neuroeconomics winds up serving as a sort of big tent for economists, biologists, and other academics interested in how we make decisions.
For Huettel, for instance, coming from a background in psychology, the attraction of working with economics lay in its precision: "I was previously studying basic executive-control processing, and that was pretty much like decision-making, but perhaps you can think of it at a simpler, more psychological level. And what really excited me was almost a methodological point, which is that we can really do some very controlled, well-formulated tasks using economics. It provides a level of precision that we didn't always have in the psychological brand of tests."
Huettel's lab specializes in the technology known as fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, which involves combining multiple sequential images from the well-known tumor-scanning machines to reconstruct blood flow in the brain. This blood flow is linked with certain forms of brain activity, and thus offers a noninvasive method of acquiring information about brain function in real time. Made famous by the color-coded pictures used to illustrate popular science articles, its application is one of the fastest-growing areas of brain research.
What interests Huettel most are the social factors that attend decision-making. "I think the coolest sorts of studies are at the intersection of social information and economics," he says. "Aside from [the fact] that they're omnipresent, social situations may allow us to look at systems in a cleaner way. Even though it seems more complex, it may be that the systems involved in decision-making evolved to deal with that type of information, not gambles presented in terms of rewards and probabilities.
"And what these sorts of studies will suggest, I think, is that the concept of economic utility, the bedrock, is probably not strictly the case. That we didn't evolve to deal with money, we evolved to deal with a bunch of different rewards, and those rewards might conceivably be in different currencies."
One day last summer, in order to see the method in action, I met up with Vinod Venkatraman, a student of Huettel's, at a waiting area near the fish tank in the Duke Children's Hospital. He was there to rendezvous with a test subject, one of several dozen in the medical center's prescreened database, and lead her back to the secured wing of the hospital where the MRI scanners are housed.
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