200006 PS Proseminar zu Biologischer Psychologie und zu Kognitiv-Affektiven Neurowissenschaften (2024S)

The course Behavioral and Neuro-Economics will provide an overview of the (relatively) new fields of behavioral economics and neuro-economics; or, depending on your choice of phrasing, into the fields of decision science and neuro-decision science. This course focusses on detailing the “core ideas” which lie underneath any papers that you may encounter in these areas. Consequentially, the aim of this course is to help you construct a basic framework to further explore the topics of behavioral and neuro-economics in the future.

Since this course will be predominantly aimed at students coming from a behavioral science background (that is, psychology, neuroscience or the cognitive sciences), we will focus on the economics part of behavioral and neuro-economics. The course consists of three four blocks: one introduction block and 3 topic-specific blocks. During the first topic-specific block we will introduce and discuss the concept of economic rationality on an individual level: what is rational behavior, where are its historical origins, what place does it hold in economic theory and behavioral economics and finally, what are the limitations to rationality. In the second topic-specific block we will build upon rational behavior by exploring the implications of rational behavior for social interactions – that is, how rational principles help us to create a parsimonious framework to frame the interactions between multiple agents. Finally, in the third topic-specific block we will explore what is perhaps the newest field of decision-making research: neuro-economics (oftentimes also referred to as neuro-decision science). During this block we will explore how the combination of economic theories and novel tools in neuroscience can shed a new light on the cognitive processes that underlie our decisions.