Behaviour And The Concept Of Preference

Using the most well-studied behavioral analyses of animal subjects to promote a better understanding of the effects of disease and the effects of new therapeutic treatments on human cognition, Methods of Behavior Analysis in Neuroscience provides a reference manual for molecular and cellular research scientists in both academia and the pharmaceutic

The theory of revealed preference has a long, distinguished tradition in economics but lacked a systematic presentation of the theory until now. This book deals with basic questions in economic theory and studies situations in which empirical observations are consistent or inconsistent with some of the best known economic theories.

Pleasure, Reward, Preference: Their Nature, Determinants, and Role in Behavior covers the proceedings of a symposium by the same title, held at the Klarskovgaard Training Institute, near Korsør, Denmark, on June 5-9 1972, organized under the auspices of the Advisory Group on Human Factors of the Scientific Affairs Division of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. This book is composed of 11 chapters, and starts with a historical perspective and review of the principal problems related to understanding the principles of pleasure, reward, and preference. The next chapters explore neurophysiological research with animals and the human cognitive phenomena. These topics are followed by discussions of the concept of exploratory choice, verbal judgment, the law of effects and an adaptation-level model for affectivity and perception. The concluding chapters provide examples of behavioristic theories and describe a process model of motivation to understand the complexity of cognition and predictability of behavior. These chapters also tackle the role of pleasure and reward in human motivation and learning, as well as present a metascientific frame of motivation. This text will prove useful to psychologists, behaviorist, and researchers.

Lateral preferences are strange, puzzling, and on the surface, not particularly adaptive aspects of behavior. Why one chooses habitually to write or to brush the teeth with the right hand, while a friend or family member habitually uses the left hand, might be interesting enough to elicit some conversation over dinner or a drink, but certainly does not seem to warrant serious scientific study. Yet when one looks at human behaviors more carefully, one becomes aware that asymmet rical behaviors favoring one side or the other are actually a fairly universal characteristic of human beings. In the same way that we are right or left handed, we are also right or left footed, eyed, and eared. As a species, we are quite lopsided in our behavioral coordinations; furthermore, the vast majority of us are right sided. Considering that we are looking at a sizable number of behaviors, and at a set of biases that seem to be systematic and show a predictable skew in the popUlation, the problem takes on greater significance. The most obvious form of lateral preference is, of course, handedness. When studying behavioral asymmetries, this is the issue with which most investigators start. Actually, we entered this research area through a much different route. Around 1971 we became interested in the problem of eye dominance or eye preference. This is a behavior where the input to one eye seems to be preferred over that to the other in certain binocular viewing situations.

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Originally published over two decades ago, this classic text within the philosophy of economics is a tour de force against revealed preference. It critically examines the research programme carried out by the Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelson on the revealed preference approach to the theory of consumer behaviour. It also challenges two essential premises: * that the programme has been completed * that the various contributions of Samuelson are mutually consistent. This text contains a new preface by Wong, in which he provides a detailed insight into the origins of his pioneering text, and a new introduction from Philip Mirowski, analyzing the impact The Foundation of Paul Samuelson’s Revealed Preference Theory has had on the discipline of economics as well as explaining why it remains core reading for economists today. The defining statement of economic method, this book will be of interest to economists everywhere.

Changing preferencesis a phenomenonoften invoked but rarely properlyaccounted for. Throughout the history of the social sciences, researchers have come against the possibility that their subjects’ preferenceswere affected by the phenomenato be explainedor by otherfactorsnot taken into accountin the explanation.Sporadically, attempts have been made to systematically investigate these in uences, but none of these seems to have had a lasting impact. Today we are still not much further with respect to preference change than we were at the middle of the last century. This anthology hopes to provide a new impulse for research into this important subject. In particular, we have chosen two routes to amplify this impulse. First, we stress the use of modellingtechniquesfamiliar from economicsand decision theory. Instead of constructing complex, all-encompassing theories of preference change, the authors of this volume start with very simple, formal accounts of some possible and hopefully plausible mechanism of preference change. Eventually, these models may nd their way into larger, empirically adequate theories, but at this stage, we think that the most importantwork lies in building structure.Secondly,we stress the importance of interdisciplinary exchange. Only by drawing together experts from different elds can the complex empirical and theoretical issues in the modelling of preference change be adequately investigated.