Research Progress And Academic Contribution Of "individual Judgment And Decision-making" From The Perspective Of Economic Psychology

As a new branch of psychology, economic psychology is continually promoting the integration of psychology and economics since the date of its birth. In this inter-discipline, researchers apply the research methods and theories of psychology to economical researches, which expanded the research field of the traditional economics and developed many new important academic progresses in the theoretical research and in methodology. Economic psychology focuses on the individual judgment and decision making in uncertain situation, puts forward the theory of Dual Processing System, that is, the thermal system and cooling system. This theory affirms that emotions play an important role in the process of decision making, and it reflects and questions the idealistic hypothesis in traditional economics. Kardiner, Kahneman and other outstanding representative of economic psychologists studied on the deviations in decision making, and found the heuristic strategy and other phenomena, and put forward prospect theory to explain these newly discovered phenomena. This theory attached great importance to people's irrational behaviors, and give rise to a new discipline:behavioural economics.On the basis of systemizing many economic psychology literatures, this paper focused on the individuals' judgment and decision-making under uncertainty from the perspective of behavioral economics, behavioral finance, cross-culture, evolutionary, and cognitive neuroscience. Beginning with the individual research in economic psychology, the paper mainly discussed the new progress of individual judgment and decision making under uncertain situation, emphasized the content of heuristic strategy, frame dependence, prospect theory, mental accounts and other theories proposed by Kahneman, Tversky and others, developed a more deepgoing and systematic theoretical academic summarization.Currently the trends of behavioral research in economic psychology are as follows: the expanding of key areas, the innovation of research method, the improvement of explanation mechanism, and the increasing of application research. In these studies, researchers paid abundant attention to the emotions in decision-making, especially to the embedded emotional decision model (ie, the EIC). In recent years, studying individual judgment and decision making from the perspective of cross-cultural is another new trend in the development of economic psychology both at home and abroad. Cross-cultural studies showed that the same decision deviation could be inconsistent due to different cultures, the cultural differences between east and west, and the subculture studies provide us a new opportunity to further understand the same mechanism of social decision-making.Otherwise, the evolution of the comparative study can help limit the theoretical hypotheses and distinguish the independence between the heuristics in the study of human decision-making. Some scholars put forward the biological rational hypothesis, that is, the so-called decision deviations are rational from the perspective of one's whole lifetime, and it is formed gradually in the process of evolution. At the meantime, some of the recent popular cognitive neuroscience research methods have been used in the studies of decision-making, and this part of the studies accord with the studies of the observable behaviors. Many scholars using brain imaging analyze discussed the brain mechanism of decision-making deviation which was put forward by economic psychologists. This new trend of research takes the role of emotion in decision-making into consideration. It proves not only the mutual fusion of emotion and reasoning from the level of brain science, but also the brain mechanisms of emotions in decision basis, and questions the dual processing system in behavior studies.In this article, the author analyzes and concludes the current trend of multidisciplinary research, confirms the innovation in theory and practice, and puts forward some existing problems:a) The concept of the discipline is unclear, b) the experiment paradigms should be improved, c) the conflicts in explanation mechanism, d) the separation between the different disciplines background scholars, and e) the separation of applied research and basic research. In addition, future researches should pay attention to several aspects:a) researchers should develop a wider range of interdisciplinary research, especially pay more attention to the role of medical science and mathematics; b) research topics should extend to happiness and other non-economic fields; c) researchers in China should develop more researches with Chinese characteristics, making the research results and processed more tally with the actual situation in China; d) researchers should strengthen the applied research, and apply the theories into practice; e) the experimental paradigm should be redesigned and updated; f) researchers should pay more attention to the role of emotions in decision-making.