Ultimate Causation in Neuroaccounting?

In a series of papers, Dickhaut, Waymire and collaborators proposed that neuroscience coulduncover why accounting principles emerge and persist by tracing them to the biologically evolvedbrain (Dickhaut, 2009; Dickhaut et al., 2010; Waymire, 2014). We critically examine their bio-evolutionary approach and challenge its two main assumptions. First, we argue that neuroscientificevidence cannot reliably reconstruct evolutionary selection pressures through modular brainstructures (modularity). Second, we argue that contemporary neuroscience questions theassumption that individual behavioral tendencies translate to complex social accounting practices(consilience). We argue that since these brain modules have cultural rather than biological origins,neuroaccounting should abandon searching for ultimate evolutionary causes and instead focus onproximate mechanisms. This concerns how the brain processes accounting operations, not whyaccounting supposedly evolved. This reconceptualization offers a theoretically coherent andpractically useful research agenda, which may reinvigorate the neuroaccounting’s academicprogram, which has not yet delivered on its promise.