During the peak of the housing boom, 55 percent of all 2/28 mortgages were sold to homeowners who could have gotten prime mortgages.

ventral striatum

The Happiness Hypothesis,

Once this overlapping of ideas occurs, cortical cells start to form connections that have never existed before, wiring themselves into entirely new networks.

"People who are more rational don't perceive emotion less, they just regulate it better."

Regardless of how exactly one generates theories of other people's minds, it's clear that these theories profoundly affect moral decisions. Look, for example, at the ultimatum game, a staple of experimental economics. The rules of the game are simple, if a little bit unfair: an experimenter pairs two people together, and hands one of them ten dolla

rational agents, why don't all of them invest in stocks? Why are low-yield bonds so popular? In 1995, the behavioral economists Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi realized that the key to solving the premium equity puzzle was loss aversion. Investors buy bonds because they hate losing money, and bonds are a safe bet. Instead of making financial dec

Because working memory and rationality share a common cortical source—the prefrontal cortex—a mind trying to remember lots of information is less able to exert control over its impulses.

If people were perfectly rational—if they made decisions solely by crunching the numbers—then subjects would always choose to invest, since the expected overall value on each round is higher if one invests ($1.25, or $2.50 multiplied by the 50 percent chance of getting tails on the coin toss) than if one does not ($1). In fact, if a person invests