ESSAY GREGORY
BERNS


Fear of punishment in an economic downturn, as in a behavior laboratory can alter decision-making and discourage risk-taking.

Work is feeling more and more like a Skinner box.

A Skinner box is an operant conditioning chamber - in other words, a cage that automatically trains a laboratory animal to associate flashing lights and levers with rewards and punishments. It was invented in the 1950s by B.F.Skinner, the experimental psychologist, to study learning.

A green light flashes, or the animal pushes the right lever, and it is rewarded with a morsel of food. But some operant conditioning chambers were built with electrified floors: a red light comes on, and zap!

It doesn’t take long for a rat to figure out which light goes with the shock and which goes with the food. All animals, including we primates, are good at making these associations. Pretty soon, we don’t even need the light - the mere sight of the cage can send some of us into a state of apoplexy.

While the workplace is not quite an electrified cage, I think I would prefer a brief jolt of electricity over the intermittent shocks of daily stock market retreats or cutback after cutback by businesses.

Everyone I know is scared. Workers’ fear has generalized to their workplace and everything associated with work and money. We are caught in a spiral in which we are so scared of losing our jobs, or our savings, that fear overtakes our brains. While fear is a deep-seated and adaptive drive for self-preservation, it makes it impossible to concentrate on anything but saving our skin by getting out of the box intact.

Ultimately, no good can come from this type of decision-making. Just when we need new ideas most, everyone is seized up in fear, trying to avoid losing what we have left.

I am a neuroeconomist, which means I use brain-scanning technology to decode human decision-making. My colleagues and I conducted an experiment with our version of a Skinner box. Instead of a box, our participants were in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner. Instead of using an electrified floor, we attached electrodes to their feet. Although not unbearably painful, the shocks were meant to be unpleasant enough that the individual would prefer to avoid them altogether.

The central point of this experiment was that subjects had to wait for the shocks. Every trial began with disclosure of how strong the shock would be and how long they would have to wait: a range of 1 second to almost 30 seconds.

For many people, the wait was worse than the shock. Given a choice, almost everyone preferred to expedite the shock rather than wait for it. Nearly a third feared waiting so much that, when given the chance, they preferred getting a bigger shock right away over waiting for a smaller shock later. It sounds illogical, but fear - whether of pain or of losing a job - does strange things to decision-making.

Some people showed strong fear conditioning, as evidenced by deployment of neural resources to deal with the impending shock. Most of this activity occurred in the parts of the brain that process pain. That makes sense, but the activity rose well before the shock. All this worrying took energy, so these extreme responders had less neural processing power available for other tasks.

A recent study showed that the same parts of the brain we observed in our experiment are also active when people must sell something they are attached to. The implication is that when our brains sense pain or anticipate loss, we tend to hold onto what we have. When everyone does this at once, the result is a downward economic spiral.

Neuroscience tells us that when the fear system of the brain is active, exploratory activity and risk-taking are turned off. The first order of business, then, is to neutralize that system.

This means not being a fear monger. It means avoiding people who are overly pessimistic about the economy. It means tuning out media that fan emotional flames. It does mean being prepared, but not hyper-vigilant.

What I am doing now is looking for new opportunities. This means applying neuroscience to realms where it hasn’t been used before. I have joined anthropologists in using brain imaging to understand the biological roots of political conflict. I am starting another project to use brain imaging to predict which teenagers are likely to make fatally bad judgments and, hopefully, train them to make better decisions.

This strategy keeps my brain’s exploratory system active. Yes, these new ventures are risky, and some will fail. But while others wait for the storm to pass, I’m busy expanding into new areas. If I wait for money to start flowing again, the opportunities will have passed.