What is Cognitive Economics?

Abstract

Modern science, while diversifying the subjects of its research, is tending towards the use of a cross-disciplinary approach to test its hypotheses. The paradigms of each discipline are thus being subjected to appraisal by the yardsticks of their neighbouring disciplines. Over the last thirty years, cognitive science has been forming hypotheses and models of cognition and subjecting them to experimentation. Its impact on a great number of disciplines continues to grow. Because they study knowing beings and their interactions, the social sciences stand to be considerably enriched by a cognitive turn Cognitive economics lies within this movement of the social sciences. This turn can be defined, very broadly, as the integration into economic theory of individual and collective cognitive processes and their particular constraints, both on the level of individual agents and that of their dynamic interactions in economic processes.