Game Theory: Jane Austen Had It First

Michael Chwe

by Jennifer Schuessler

New York Times
April 22, 2013

It’s not every day that someone stumbles upon a major new strategic thinker during family movie night. But that’s what happened to Michael Chwe, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, when he sat down with his children some eight years ago to watch Clueless, the 1995 romantic comedy based on Jane Austen’s Emma.

Mr. Chwe (pronounced CHEH), the author of papers like “Farsighted Coalitional Stability” and “Anonymous Procedures for Condorcet’s Model: Robustness, Nonmonotonicity and Optimality,” had never cracked Emma or Pride and Prejudice. But on screen, he saw glimmers of a strategic intelligence that would make Henry Kissinger blush.

“This movie was all about manipulation,” Mr. Chwe, a practitioner of the hard-nosed science of game theory, said recently by telephone. “I had always been taught that game theory was a mathematical thing. But when you think about it, people have been thinking about strategic action for a long time.”

Mr. Chwe set to doing his English homework, and now his assignment is in. Jane Austen, Game Theorist, just published by Princeton University Press, is more than the larky scholarly equivalent of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. In 230 diagram-heavy pages, Mr. Chwe argues that Austen isn’t merely fodder for game-theoretical analysis, but an unacknowledged founder of the discipline itself: a kind of Empire-waisted version of the mathematician and cold war thinker John von Neumann, ruthlessly breaking down the stratagems of 18th-century social warfare.

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Forging a new field of social neuroscience

by William Harms

University of Chicago
April 22, 2013

Knowing when someone is being harmed on purpose is a crucial element of moral thinking, even in children. But University of Chicago neuroscientist Jean Decety’s work has shown that people's neural response to intentional harm varies by age, with adults being more discriminative in determining moral culpability.

Fellow scholar John Cacioppo has pioneered the study of loneliness, showing that it can influence a person’s health as much as cigarette smoking, obesity, or a lack of exercise. A sense of isolation affects key cellular processes within the brain, heart, and immune system, Cacioppo has found.

Their work on how people’s social lives relate to neural, hormonal, and genetic mechanisms has helped define a field called social neuroscience. Cacioppo and Decety formally established the international, interdisciplinary Society for Social Neuroscience in 2010 and have since turned UChicago into a global center for its study by launching a number of research projects to examine the brain and body’s responses to the social world.

“I realized that we will never be able to understand such human ability as moral judgment or empathy without studying the brain, its development, and evolutionary history,” says Decety, the Irving B. Harris Professor in Psychology and Psychiatry, who studies brain scans to examine the neurobiological mechanisms of empathy.

“We can’t limit our study of people strictly to their biological functions. We are influenced by our social connections,” says Cacioppo, the Tiffany & Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology, who coined the term “social neuroscience” more than 20 years ago. “Gene expression can be turned on or off, for example, by social conditions.”

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Consumers, Too, Seek Closure

by Daniel Akst

Wall Street Journal
April 10, 2013

Choosing is hard and buyer’s remorse is easy. So when consumers make a choice, particularly a hard choice, they’re happier with it if they perform some small act that emphasizes the finality of their decision.

In four studies covered by a newly published paper, researchers found that “choice closure” inhibits people’s tendency to reconsider and increased the chooser’s satisfaction. In one study, participants were asked to choose from an array of chocolates on a covered tray, but only some of the volunteers were asked to restore the lid after choosing. Later, those lid restorers reported liking their chocolate more than those who hadn’t restored the lid. A similar result came from another study involving choosing foods and then closing—or not closing—the menu.

The findings are consistent with prior research showing that people often are happier with irrevocable choices, which promote rationalizing and make it harder to conduct post-choice comparisons.

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When Your Boss Makes You Pay for Being Fat

Wall Street Journal
April 5, 2013

Are you a man with a waist measuring 40 inches or more? If you want to work at Michelin North America Inc., that spare tire could cost you.

Employees at the tire maker who have high blood pressure or certain size waistlines may have to pay as much as $1,000 more for health-care coverage starting next year.

As they fight rising health-care costs and poor results from voluntary wellness programs, companies across America are penalizing workers for a range of conditions, including high blood pressure and thick waistlines. They are also demanding that employees share personal-health information, such as body-mass index, weight and blood-sugar level, or face higher premiums or deductibles.

Corporate leaders say they can't lower health-care costs without changing workers' habits, and they cite the findings of behavioral economists showing that people respond more effectively to potential losses, such as penalties, than expected gains, such as rewards. With corporate spending on health care expected to reach an average of $12,136 per employee this year, according to a study by the consulting firm Towers Watson, penalties may soon be the new norm.

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Avoid Impulsive Acts by Imagining Future Benefits

Science Daily
April 3, 2013

Why is it so hard for some people to resist the least little temptation, while others seem to possess incredible patience, passing up immediate gratification for a greater long-term good?

The answer, suggests a new brain imaging study from Washington University in St. Louis, lies in how effective people are at feeling good right now about all the future benefits that may come from passing up a smaller immediate reward. Researchers found that activity in two regions of the brain distinguished impulsive and patient people.

“Activity in one part of the brain, the anterior prefrontal cortex , seems to show whether you’re getting pleasure from thinking about the future reward you are about to receive,” explains study co-author Todd Braver, PhD, professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences. “People can relate to this idea that when you know something good is coming, just that waiting can feel pleasurable.”

The study, which was published in the first issue of the Journal of Neuroscience this year, was designed to examine what happens in the brain as people wait for a reward, especially whether people characterized as “impulsive” would show different brain responses than those considered “patient.”

The lead author of the study was Koji Jimura, then a postdoctoral researcher in Braver’s Cognitive Control and Psychopathology Laboratory, and now a research associate professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, in Japan.

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Brain Scans Predict Who’s Likely to Commit Crime

by Daniel Akst

Wall Street Journal
April 3, 2013

Researchers using magnetic resonance imaging have found that they can predict which inmates are likeliest to break the law again after they’re released.

In a study of 96 male offenders in New Mexico, scientists found during a four-year follow-up that those with low activity in the anterior cingulate cortex were twice as likely to commit another offense as those who had high activity in this brain region. The researchers figured this out by asking participants to take a “go/no go” test that involved pressing a button every time they saw the letter X on screen, but being careful not to press when they saw the letter K. MRIs performed during this test mapped brain activity.

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