Neuroanthropological Economics: Theoretical Foundations for a Future Discipline in Development Economics

Abstract

For decades, development economics has struggled to explain why well-designed, evidence-based poverty interventions fail in culturally rich, trauma-affected communities. Standard models — neoclassical, behavioural, or institutional — treat poverty as purely economic, cognitive, or structural, but never as a simultaneous product of neurobiology, culture, and historical trauma. This article introduces Neuroanthropological Economics (NAE) as a future interdisciplinary discipline, grounded in the Neuro-Anthropological Leadership Model (NALM) developed through doctoral research in Nederburg, Western Cape, South Africa (Kouadio, 2026).
NAE proposes that economic behaviour emerges from the simultaneous interaction of three constitutive systems — neural substrates (stress and reward neurochemistry), cultural practices (transmitted value frameworks and institutional logics), and historical legacies (trauma embodied in physiological hypervigilance) — and that poverty is best understood as a neuro-cultural trap: a self-reinforcing system in which scarcity generates chronic neural stress, which impairs cognitive function, which perpetuates economically short-sighted behaviour, which reproduces scarcity. This definition is not metaphorical; it is grounded in the neurobiological literature on cortisol, prefrontal cortex impairment, and amygdala hyperreactivity under chronic stress.
The article establishes the future NAE's theoretical foundations through six core concepts derived from NALM: (1) the neuro-cultural trap; (2) oxytocin-dopamine trust loops; (3) cortisol-mediated institutional distrust; (4) the Cultural Appropriateness Score (CAS); (5) biometric indicators as leading predictors of economic behaviour; and (6) the Financial Resilience Index (FRI). It articulates five methodological principles, positions NAE in comparative dialogue with behavioural economics, development economics, anthropological economics, trauma-informed development, and neuro-anthropology, and proposes a global research agenda structured around seven testable hypotheses and three foundational cross-disciplinary questions.
NAE's claim is not merely academic. By incorporating neurobiological, cultural, and historical dimensions into economic frameworks, it offers a more complete, humane, and effective approach to development policy — one that respects the brain's hardware, culture's software, and history's lasting inscriptions on both. This article argues that NAE constitutes a genuine disciplinary breakthrough: not an incremental extension of existing paradigms, but a reconceptualisation of the foundations of economic behaviour itself.