It took a major meltdown to jar them from their biases but the intellectual powers that be, from the Hudson and Charles rivers to the shores of Lake Michigan, finally are giving serious credence to the reality that most people, even professionals, don’t and even can’t act rationally in the face of making risk decisions. The list of the ways we don’t act rationally is limitless and defies categorization (believe me I have tried) but there are a few things I can definitively say about taking the next step in a real understanding of “the brain on risk”.

The first – instead of just saying “emotions are required for a decision” – explore what that means. Maybe we will find that the emotional states or emotional data will be easier to categorize than the behavioral! Think “emotions as information”.

Second, start to take the social context – and what is known as Theory of Mind – into account when understanding your own and someone else’s seemingly irrational decision.

It is hard for me at this point to decide for myself which comes first – the feeling or the social setting. And in fact they are most likely reciprocal but I can say for sure that the forefront of understand behavioral economics lies not in thinking harder but in fact in thinking about thinking and rethinking the role of feelings and social expectations in perception, judgment and decision making.