Dr. Ming Hsu

The Telegraph article Scanner shows our heart rules our heads said

Down the millennia, great minds have struggled with the issue of whether it is rational to be ethical. Plato, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill, to mention a few, have tried to work out what is better, to do what is right, and be fair, or to do what is good, and to make sure that the most people benefit?
 
Now a study of the roots of morality in Science by Dr Ming Hsu of University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Drs Cedric Anen and Steve Quartz of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, shows how our sense of fairness rests on sentiment, not logic, backing the view of 18th century Scottish thinker David Hume, who argued that passions drive moral judgement.
 
They scanned the brains of 26 people recruited through the online bulletin system Craigslist — nine of which were male — while they were making a series of tough decisions about how to allocate donations to children in a Ugandan orphanage.
 
Dr Hsu says. "Quite a few came out saying: 'This is the worst experiment I've ever been in. I never want to do anything like this again.'"

Ming Hsu, Ph.D. is currently Beckman Fellow at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He spends part of his time at the Economics department, where he will be starting his full time appointment as assistant professor in late 2008. Prior to this he was a Ph.D. student at the California Institute of Technology.
 
His background is primarily in the interdisciplinary areas of behavioral economics (economics and psychology) and neuroeconomics (economics and neuroscience). They allow him to bring a variety of models and methods to study the relevant questions, including behavioral and field experiments, as well as neuroimaging and neuropsychological data.
 
The goal of his research is to understand a diverse array of individual and social decision-making processes. His current and past research projects include decision making under risk and ambiguity, nonlinear weighting of probabilities, moral decision-making, and price formation in double auction markets. Future research includes translating these and other findings to applied domains, such as how decision-making changes over age and environments.
 
Ming authored A Model of Elections with Spatial and Distributive Preferences, and coauthored Divergence, Closed Cycles and Convergence in Scarf Environments: Experiments in the Dynamics of General Equilibrium Systems, Neural Systems Responding to Degrees of Uncertainty in Human Decision-Making, The Neurobiological Foundations of Valuation in Human Decision-Making under Uncertainty, Functional Neuroimaging of Place Learning in Computer-Generated Space, Place learning in virtual space. III: Investigation of spatial navigation training procedures and their application to fMRI and clinical neuropsychology, and The Right and the Good: Distributive Justice and Neural Encoding of Equity and Efficiency.
 
Ming earned his B.A. (Summa cum Laude) in Political Science at the University of Arizona in 2001 and his Ph.D. in Social Sciences at Caltech (California Institute of Technology) in 2006 with the dissertation "Three Essays on Neuroeconomics".
 
Read Charting the Agony Of a Brain as It Struggles to Be Fair and Heart rules head on risky calls: Uncertainty activates the brain's sentimental centres.