SORRY TO be personal but how much do you earn? Now, how much do you think you should earn? My guess is that the second sum is greater than the first.
Of course, there is a simple explanation. When you took your job, your brain figured that the salary you ended up accepting was probably the highest you could trouser without jeopardising your chances of employment. Your employer probably regarded it differently — it was the lowest he could offer to persuade you to succumb. And so a happy — and probably secret — bargain was struck.
Now the fast-growing field of neuroeconomics — the study of how the brain makes decisions, particularly concerning risks and rewards — threatens to blow this process wide open. Within a year, predicts Professor Paul Glimcher, one of the field’s top researchers, it might be possible for a brain scan to identify the lowest salary that a candidate will accept. Even a monkey can work out that unscrupulous corporations could exploit such research.
In fact, Glimcher, at New York University, has managed to get monkeys to work out quite a lot about how we behave economically. Primates don’t get hung up about money but fruit juice is an ideal commodity with which to broker monkey deals.
And the deals are the monkey equivalents of these: if you had the choice between tossing a coin in the hope of winning £2 million, or taking home a guaranteed £1 million, which would you choose? Most would opt for the latter, because the anticipated usefulness of the guaranteed cash is so high. But lower the guaranteed win to, say £100,000 — and our decision might waver.
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When Glimcher’s monkeys weigh up similar choices, particular groups of neurons fire in their brains. Astoundingly, the rate at which these neurons become active correlates exactly to the expected utility of the juice reward. So using a mathematical formula, Glimcher can predict, with 95 per cent accuracy, how his simian charges will behave. No wonder Glimcher, who regards his own findings as “spooky”, is now calling for legislation to regulate the use of brain scans.