Society, Organizations and the Brain: building towards a unified cognitive neuroscience perspective.

The objective of this Research Topic is to bring together scholars in both the neurosciences and organizational sciences who have adopted various approaches to study the cognitive mechanisms mediating the social behavior that we see within organizations. Such an approach has been termed by ourselves, and others, as ‘organisational cognitive neuroscience’. In recent years there has been a veritable increase in studies that have explored the cognitive mechanisms driving such behaviours, and much progress has been made in understanding the neural underpinnings of processes such as financial exchange, risk awareness and even leadership. However, while these studies are informative and add to our understanding of human cognition they fall short of providing evidence-based recommendations for practice. Specifically, we would like to address the broader issue of how the neuroscientific study of such core social behaviors can be used to improve the very way that we work. To address these gaps in our understanding the Research Topic will serve as a platform that will allow scholars in both the neurosciences and the organizational sciences to highlight the work that spans across these two fields.

The consolidation of these two fields that will be seen with the various submissions to this Research Topic will also serve to highlight the utility of a singular organizational cognitive neuroscience. This is a fundamentally important outcome of the Research Topic as the application of neuroscience to address economically relevant behaviours has seen a variety of fields evolve in their own right, such as neuromarketing, neuroeconomics and so forth. The use of neuro-scientific technologies,in particular fMRI, has indeed lead to a bewildering (and somewhat suffocating) proliferation of new approaches, however, the speed of such developments demands that we must proceed carefully with such ventures or risk some fundamental mistakes. The submissions to this Research Topic will attempt to consolidate the new neuroscience based approaches and in doing so highlight the importance of this approach in helping us to understand human social behaviour in general. Submissions are welcomed from a range of perspectives and techniques – we encourage theoretical commentaries that address various questions as well as original reports. Taken together the submissions to this Research Topic will provide a framework for scholars within the neurosciences who wish to explore the further the opportunities that the study of organisational behaviour may provide.