Frames, Biases, and Rational Decision-Making in the Human Brain

By Benedetto de Martino, Dharshan Kumaran, Ben Seymour, R. J. Dolan. Science, 2006

1,576 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Human choices are remarkably susceptible to the manner in which options are presented. This so-called “framing effect” represents a striking violation of standard economic accounts of human rationality, although its underlying neurobiology is not understood. We found that the framing effect was specifically associated with amygdala activity, suggesting a key role for an emotional system in mediating decision biases. Moreover, across individuals, orbital and medial prefrontal cortex activity predicted a reduced susceptibility to the framing effect. This finding highlights the importance of incorporating emotional processes within models of human choice and suggests how the brain may modulate the effect of these biasing influences to approximate rationality.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, General Decision Sciences, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/74cb9160cf9c8f81397651754e830ab05d24e330

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Citations in the corpus

The effect of emotion and time pressure on risk decision-making (2015, background): “Empirical findings proposed that humans can integrate emotional impacts of potential decisions into the framework of utility evaluation through the function of amygdala and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) (De Martino et al. 2006; Pessoa 2008; Taber-Thomas and Bradley 2012).”
Multiple Systems for Value Learning (2014, background): “…to mediate Pavlovian-instrumental interactions, namely the ventral striatum and the amygdala, are most often identified as being active under NEUROECONOMICS situations where an individual’s choices are prone to irrational biases such as framing or endowment effects, (De Martino et al., 2006, 2009).”
The underlying anatomical correlates of long-term meditation: Larger hippocampal and frontal volumes of gray matter (2009, background): “, showed more consistency across decisions, regardless of the manner in which available choices are presented) had significantly enhanced activities in the right orbito-frontal cortex (DeMartino et al., 2006).”
Episodic future thinking reduces reward delay discounting through an enhancement of prefrontal-mediotemporal interactions. (2010, background): “…change dynamically (Rushworth and Behrens, 2008; Walton et al., 2007), choice in settings that require cognitive control over strong innate behavioral tendencies (De Martino et al., 2006; Roiser et al., 2009), and decisions involving cost-benefit computations (Floresco and Ghods-Sharifi, 2007).”