Values, rewards, and costs play a central role in economic, statistical, and psychological notions of decision making. They also have surprisingly direct neural realizations. This chapter discusses the ways in which different value systems interact with different decision-making systems to fashion and shape affectively appropriate behavior in complex environments. Forms of deliberative and automatic decision making are interpreted as sharing a common purpose rather than serving different or non-normative goals.
Introduction
There is perhaps no more critical factor for the survival of an organism than the manner in which it chooses between different courses of action or inaction. A seemingly obvious way to formalize choice is to evaluate the predicted costs and benefi ts of each option and pick the best. However, seething beneath the surface of this bland dictate lies a host of questions about such things as a common currency with which to capture the costs and benefi ts, the different mechanisms by which these predictions may be made, the different information that predictors might use to assess the costs and benefi ts, the possibility of choosing when or how quickly to act as well as what to do, and different prior expectations that may be brought to bear in that vast majority of cases when aspects of the problem remain uncertain.
In keeping with the complexity and centrality of value-based choice, quite a number of psychologically and neurally different systems are involved. These systems interact both cooperatively and competitively. In this chapter, I outline the apparent dependence of four decision-making mechanisms on four different value systems. Although this complexity might seem daunting, we will see that exact parallels can be found in ideas about how artifi cial systems such as
From the Strüngmann Forum Report: Better Than