Menka: And care is often treated as a soft kind of private virtue. So now you're in this field of neuroeconomics. How are you going about the process of convincing policymakers or economists? That it belongs in the territory of hard numbers. And as a wrap-up, just to say where your current work is heading in that field.

Tania: Yeah, so the field of caring economics is huge. It basically originated when I was a professor in an economy department in Zurich for a while, where I realized that the model of Homo economicus was a bit outdated, to say it nicely, very outdated. And so I started developing motivation-based economic models where you don't have just a utility function about egoism, optimizing your own utility as it is still considered in classic neuroeconomics. But that care… we talked about the care system, right?

This altruistic system is one of many motivational systems we have. We have affiliative system, threat system, we have achievement motivation, we have different motivational systems. And care is one very altruistic one, and we should put this caring motivation, which is very evolutionarily old, back into the center of economics, because economics is about us, right? It is our...

it is... it is. It is telling.

Menka: Yes, how...

Tania: Yeah.

Menka: It's like it's.

Tania: It's basically telling us humans how to exchange goods, right? But for the welfare of us all, and not against the welfare of us all, right? So, putting back the care system into the center of an economic model, and really also modeling utility function, which is an economic term, right? Based on the notion of we having a care system which is actually really capable of caring about others, and really altruistically motivated.

And how to train it, right? I mean. Some economist notion is either you are an altruist or you are an egoist. Our data show using economic games and economic paradigms that you can actually, through these mental training, through socio-affective, through diets.

You can shift someone from being egoistic to altruistic within three months. So you are not born with it. You can cultivate.

Menka: Hiring.

Tania: You can cultivate kindness, you can cultivate compassion. It's not just a give more or not. And that is revolutionary for economic model, because for them, preferences are fixed. You are either you are like that or that, or you like this or that, but it doesn't change over a lifetime, certainly not over training, and so this is, caring economics is talking a lot about that. How can care become the focus of our economic thinking and acting again?