Some Commentaries From the Neurosciences Point of View About the Relations Between Citizens and Public Agencies

Abstract

The success story continues making Nudge well read and much applied. The key message is that people are irrational on their decision making and need to be guided by policy markers, which are able to have useful insights from Psychology and Behavioral Economics about how to elaborate choice structures to rationalize people’s financial behavior. Inertia is one popular of these insights and refers to the tendency of humans to procrastinate in making choices. This tendency is acknowledged but not understood and explained. The same occurs with other reported insights. In contrast, the present paper proposes any decision guaranteeing the individual biological; psychological and social homeostasis are rational despite being or not the expected decision supported by any formal model. Most of the important human decisions are about keeping homeostasis within boundaries promoting well being, hence resulting from complex analyses of benefits; risks and costs from both the personal and social point of view as carried out by two different Personal and Social Decision Networks. Rational choice selects, therefore, high beneficial goods or services for promoting homeostasis at lowest risk and cost from both personal and social point of views. A decision neural model for decision making is presented and used to illustrate how rational choices are computed to guarantee individual homeostasis, and to propose that individuals seem to be irrational because the proposed economic formal theories take into consideration just the policy maker point of view disregarding the individual needs.