Emotional Economics and Choice Architecture: Helping Humans to Make Better Decisions Our intuitions allow us to have an immediate perception of a situation, saving us expensive and complex mental calculations. They are a concentration of strategies that can process the necessary data to react in the twinkling of an eye. Their speed, however, is at the expense of accuracy. Filled with emotion, difficult to control or change, our intuitions are approximate and sometimes dramatically misleading.
In solving problems and making decisions we can fall victim to mental traps, for which the experimental evidence has gradually outlined an increasingly precise geography, to the point that we can ‘see’ them through the activation areas of our brains.
How can we defend ourselves from mental traps and learn to make better decisions? If unconscious mental mechanisms produce the greatest effects where you don’t expect them, it will be necessary to learn to identify and predict the working contexts in which they occur. When to trust our intuitions and when to distrust them is something that can be learned.
The error of intuition in solving problems is not the result of chance, but the product of systematic and predictable mental processes and emotions. Identifying and understanding these cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms – and using them to make better decisions and design better ‘choice environments’ for individuals and society as a whole – is the purpose of this session.PsychoEconomics.
In his research, Matteo investigates the neurobiological basis of human rationality by studying the neural correlates of decision-making processes in economic-financial contexts, with particular attention to the role of emotions, regret, fear, loss aversion, and social learning.
For the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, he designed and tested the ways in which the results of behavioral economics and neuroeconomics, can inform more effective and evidence-based public policies.
