Better than conscious? : decision making, the human mind, and implications for institutions / edited by Christoph Engel and Wolf Singer ; program advisory committee: Christoph Engel [and others].

Forum held June 10-15, 2007 in Frankfurt, Germany.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Better than conscious? : the brain, the psyche, behavior, and institutions / Christoph Engel and Wolf Singer -- Conscious and nonconscious processes : distinct forms of evidence accumulation? / Stanislas Dehaene -- The role of value systems in decision making / Peter Dayan -- Neurobiology of decision making : an intentional framework / Michael N. Shadlen [and others] -- Brain signatures of social decision making / Kevin McCabe and Tania Singer -- Neuronal correlates of decision making / Michael Platt [and others] -- The evolution of implicit and explicit decision making / Robert Kurzban -- Passive parallel automatic minimalist processing / Roger Ratcliff and Gail McKoon -- How culture and brain mechanisms interact in decision making / Merlin Donald -- Marr, memory, and heuristics / Lael J. Schooler -- Explicit and implicit strategies in decision making / Christian Keysers [and others] -- How evolution outwits bounded rationality : the efficient interaction of automatic and deliberate processes in decision making and implications for institutions / Andreas Glöckner -- The evolutionary biology of decision making / Jeffrey R. Stevens -- Gene culture coevolution and the evolution of social institutions / Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson -- Individual decision making and the evolutionary roots of institutions / Richard McElreath [and others] -- The neurobiology of individual decision making, dualism, and legal accountability / Paul W. Glimcher -- Conscious and nonconscious cognitive processes in jurors' decisions / Reid Hastie -- Institutions for intuitive man / Christoph Engel -- Institutional design capitalizing on the intuitive nature of decision making / Mark Lubell [and others].

Print version record.

Access restricted to Ryerson students, faculty and staff. CaOTR

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 Strungmann 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.

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