While its Scottish founder Adam Smith analysed society with an eye on human nature, and particularly on moral sentiments , economy turned its back, partly for the sake of easy modelling, to real humans, and considered a universe of abstract rational, selfish, maximizing 'agents'. Homo Sapiens gave way to Homo Economicus.

But today, decision theory is taking a cognitive turn, through what has been called 'Neuroeconomics'. These researches are beginning to show what evolutionary theory has surmised quite a long time ago: that man is in part a moral animal; its rationality is not that of abstract modeling; it is made of a set of limited heuristics, ecologically specialised, and sometimes isolated from the rest of cognition. Many heuristics of this kind, particularly in the moral domain, take the shape of hard-to-justify, impossible-to-neglect, intuitions. They do not seek to maximize their own utility only. As the neural underpinnings of real economic men are unravelled by experimenta economics, closely coupled with cognitive neuroscience, anthropology is joining in this research, in order to complete the picture with universally valid assumptions. Together, these three approaches promise to reconcile Economic Man with its biological and cultural counterpart.

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