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Information Processing Biases in the Brain: Implications for Decision-Making and Self-Governance

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Abstract

To make behavioral choices that are in line with our goals and our moral beliefs, we need to gather and consider information about our current situation. Most information present in our environment is not relevant to the choices we need or would want to make and thus could interfere with our ability to behave in ways that reflect our underlying values. Certain sources of information could even lead us to make choices we later regret, and thus it would be beneficial to be able to ignore that information. Our ability to exert successful self-governance depends on our ability to attend to sources of information that we deem important to our decision-making processes. We generally assume that, at any moment, we have the ability to choose what we pay attention to. However, recent research indicates that what we pay attention to is influenced by our prior experiences, including reward history and past successes and failures, even when we are not aware of this history. Even momentary distractions can cause us to miss or discount information that should have a greater influence on our decisions given our values. Such biases in attention thus raise questions about the degree to which the choices that we make may be poorly informed and not truly reflect our ability to otherwise exert self-governance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, LSRC, Box 90999, Durham, NC, 27708, USA

    Anthony W. Sali

  2. Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD, 21218, USA

    Anthony W. Sali, Brian A. Anderson & Susan M. Courtney

  3. Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Susan M. Courtney

  4. F.M. Kirby Research Center for Functional Brain Imaging, Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Susan M. Courtney

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  1. Anthony W. Sali
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Correspondence to Anthony W. Sali.

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This work was supported by U.S. National Institutes of Health grant R01-DA013165 and National Endowment for the Humanities grant RZ-50892-08 to S.M.C.

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Sali, A.W., Anderson, B.A. & Courtney, S.M. Information Processing Biases in the Brain: Implications for Decision-Making and Self-Governance. Neuroethics 11, 259–271 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-016-9251-1

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