Brain Region Affected by Economic Advice

In times of crisis, people are very likely to find themselves in the situation where their own financial status is beyond them. In such circumstances, they must seek the help of a professional advisor, who usually gives them the counsel they're looking for. It's what happens in the brains of clients at that point that has been the subject of a new scientific study, published in the March 2009 issue of the Public Library of Science (PLOS One).

According to the new research, certain areas in the brain, mostly those involved in decision-making processes, shut down once people get the advice they need, which means that they no longer pass the things that the expert has told them through their own cognitive filters.

For this experiment, scientists at the Emory University have used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), to “map” the exact response of patients' brains and to determine which areas of the cortex “light up,” and which go “dark” in this situation.

“While the field of neuroeconomics has made progress in understanding the neurobiological basis of risky decision-making, the neural mechanisms through which external information is integrated in that process had not been studied before this,” Emory University School of Medicine professor of neuroeconomics and psychiatry Gregory Berns, MD, PhD, the leader of the new research, explains.

“Results showed that brain regions consistent with decision-making were active in participants when making choices on their own; however, there occurred an offloading of the decision-making process in the presence of expert advice,” the first author of the study, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences researcher fellow Jan B. Engelmann, PhD, adds.

“The expert provided very conservative advice, which in our experiment did not lead to the highest earnings. But the brain activation results suggested that the offloading of decision making was driven by trust in the expert,” the coauthor of the PLOS One paper, Emory Department of Economics economist C. Monica Capra, PhD, stresses.

“This study indicates that the brain relinquishes responsibility when a trusted authority provides expertise. The problem with this tendency is that it can work to a person's detriment if the trusted source turns out to be incompetent or corrupt,” Berns concludes.