“We should start getting scared”

O neurocientista Jonah Lehrer, autor de “Proust era um Neurocientista” (que vai ser lançado hoje em Portugal), esteve em Londres a promover o seu mais recente livro “How we decide”. No blogue dele publica uma pergunta que o interessou. Aqui está:

“Given the massive decision-making flaws exposed by the current economic mess, what variables should scientists be investigating in the future so that we can better understand how we got here? In other words, what will be the hot topic in decision-making science two years from now?”

Eis a resposta: “I think the financial crisis has helped expose a powerful bias in human decision-making, which is our abhorrence of uncertainty. We hate not knowing, and this often leads us to neglect relevant information that might undermine the certainty of our conclusions. I think some of the most compelling research on this topic has been done by Colin Camerer, who has played a simple game called the Ellsberg paradox with subjects in an fMRI machine. To make a long story short, Camerer showed that players in the uncertainty condition - they were given less information about the premise of the game - exhibited increased activity in the amygdala, a center of fear, anxiety and other aversive emotions. In other words, we filled in the gaps of our knowledge with fright. This leads us to find ways to minimize our uncertainty - we can't stand such negative emotions - and so we start cherry-picking facts and forgetting to question our assumptions.”

O neurocientista opina: “Why not bring in actual investment bankers and watch how they respond to varying levels of information, or how giving them a quantitative model that's supposed to assess risk (and thus remove the uncertainty) alters their decision-making process?”

A culpa não é dos modelos. Ele diz de quem é: “It's the fault of all those executives who used these models they didn't really understand to silence their amygdala, so that their fear of risk disappeared. They were certain there was little to worry about, which is generally a sign that we should start getting scared.”