Colin Camerer
The Pioneer
The frontier and an appetite for the unknown, goes first.
Colin Camerer is The Pioneer by his own description, practicing what he calls intellectual entrepreneurship, crossing disciplinary boundaries out of curiosity and an appetite for the dramatic rather than any mandate. His move into neuroeconomics was frontier-seeking rather than strategic positioning, literalized in a method that bypasses self-report entirely to interrogate the amygdala and insula directly. For the Caltech behavioral economist, the brain is simply a more honest informant than the conscious mind.
“Neuroeconomics seemed to me like just another thing to do. Part of it is my personality is kind of like intellectual entrepreneurship. I liked doing different things over the years — neureconomics was just a chance to do something even more dramatic.”
“Sometimes you want to ask the brain rather than ask the person. If I show a face expressing fear for thirty milliseconds and then a mask, people say they saw nothing — but the amygdala responds. The brain knows; it just doesn't get to the publicist's desk.”
“We have a couple of fMRI studies on price bubbles. The people more likely to sell when price is at sixty have heightened activity in insular cortex — we think of the insula as the early warning signal that there's going to be a crash.”
Masters in Business: “Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer”
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