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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.
Print bio!
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