How do we make decisions, and what forces shape those decisions? How can we apply what we learn about human health and behavior to inform and improve public policy to make it more effective? The Institute for the Study of Decision Making (ISDM) was formed to bring together different scientific disciplines—including neuroscience, economics, psychology, and urban informatics—to tackle the next gener
ation of human behavior research challenges and translate that research into improved public policy. ISDM breaks down the barriers between these and other disciplines and integrates the insights from these seemingly disparate fields into the study of neuroeconomics: understanding how people make decisions. Combined with our partner institutions within NYU, ISDM is the premiere global research institution for neuroeconomics and human behavior. Decades ago, scholars of human decision-making with a bent toward policy were economists. Trained in econometrics, those social scientists used sophisticated mathematical tools to connect macro-scale measures of our societies to the social policies meant to improve our welfare. In the late 1970s and early 1980s a group of pioneering psychologists, led by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, began to develop a richer academic notion of decision-making that reached down from economics to psychology for novel insights. Thirty years later, those insights, which began the “behavioral revolution,” have become fundamental drivers in the world of policy. Fifteen years ago, a group of cognitive neuroscientists began to push down even further, exploring how the structural features of our nervous systems condition our behaviors and our choices. Today, the policy implications of those “neuroeconomic” insights are beginning to be explored as well. From each of those revolutions what emerged was both a more consilient view of human behavior and an aspiration to policy – an effort to shape our societies by using all that we know about how humans make decisions. ISDM takes that trend a step further by embracing a new and radically different opportunity. This opportunity allows researchers to reach upwards directly to the policy level, while at the same time testing what has been learned about the human decision-maker in an unprecedented way.
