![]() ![]() Kable: One that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is “ network, ” because brain imagers use that in a very specific way. (WiN): What is your favorite field specific vocabulary word or phrase? You wouldn’t want only ants on your team, and you wouldn’t want only grasshoppers on your team. There is the very famous parable of the ant and the grasshopper where one is living for today and the other is storing for tomorrow. In most cases you wouldn’t want to be too imbalanced on one side or the other of that spectrum. Just knowing that people have these different tendencies in terms of being focused on the future versus having the short term view is important and is relevant for management and strategic planning. So one thing that financial companies want to understand is, “how does the aging process potentially affect how people make these tradeoffs?” especially because older individuals arguably face more consequential tradeoffs of this nature.Īnother implication for business is more in terms of management, in terms of understanding the personnel on your team. Understanding the neural basis also has applications in understanding what happens as consumers age. This has implications for understanding why different consumers make the decisions that they do. And a lot of that is reflected in and is paralleled in their brains. They vary dramatically in how patient or impatient they are with respect to the future in terms of their future time perspective. ![]() One of the things that we’ve established is that people make these tradeoffs in different ways. Obvious connections involve the fact that many consumers have to make these kinds of tradeoffs in financial decision making. Kable: There are some obvious connections, and even some sort of not obvious connections. (WiN): What do you see as the connection between the research that is being done and business? We’re interested in decisions that involve persistence, so once you’ve chosen to pursue an outcome do you stick with that outcome in the face of different options? We are starting to extend this into the social domain, so decisions that involve a tradeoff between your own welfare and someone else’s welfare. So, we’re interested in decisions that involve a trade-off between immediate considerations and delayed considerations where you can have a smaller reward now, or a larger reward in the future. Kable: I’d say my lab’s main focus is understanding decisions that involve self-control. Then I was lucky enough to be offered a job in the psychology department here, so I came back, and started my own independent lab. In my PhD, I was generally interested in understanding brain function in humans with functional imaging techniques, and at NYU I focused in and applied them to understanding the basis of decision making by beginning to bring in thoughts and ideas from economics and decision science as well. Kable: I got my PhD in neuroscience here at Penn in the neuroscience graduate group, and after that I went and did a post-doc at NYU with Paul Glimcher, who had just started a center for neuroeconomics up at NYU. (WiN): What brought you to where you are now? A discussion with Professor Joe Kable and the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative (WiN). Interview and write-up by Katie Fazio (W’20 C’20). ![]()
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