Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [13]
A similar, but no less powerful neuromarketing experiment soon followed on the heels of the Coke–Pepsi study. Far north from Texas, four Princeton University psychologists were busy conducting another experiment, this one aimed at scanning subjects’ brains as they were presented with a choice: short-term immediate gratification versus delayed rewards.
The psychologists asked a group of random students to choose between a pair of Amazon.com gift vouchers. If they picked the first, a $15 gift voucher, they would get it at once. If they were willing to wait two weeks for the $20 gift certificate, well, obviously they’d be getting more bang for their buck. The brain scans revealed that both gift options triggered activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that generates emotion. But the possibility of getting that $15 gift certificate now! caused an unusual flurry of stimulation in the limbic areas of most students’ brains—a whole grouping of brain structures that’s primarily responsible for our emotional life, as well as for the formation of memory. The more the students were emotionally excited about something, the psychologists found, the greater the chances of their opting for the immediate, if less immediately gratifying, alternative. Of course, their rational minds knew the $20 was logically a better deal, but—guess what—their emotions won out.12
Economists, too, want to understand the underlying decisions involved in what makes us behave as we do. Economic theory may be fairly sophisticated, but it’s come up against blocks similar to the ones advertising is confronting. “Finance and economic research has hit the wall,” explains Andrew Lo, who runs AlphaSimplex Group, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, hedge fund firm. “We need to get inside the brain to understand why people make decisions.”13
That’s because, just like market research, economic modeling is based on the premise that people behave in a predictably rational way. But again, what’s beginning to show up in the fledgling world of brain scanning is the enormous influences our emotions have on every decision we make. Thus the interest in neuro-economics, the study of the way the brain makes financial decisions. Thanks to fMRI, it is giving unprecedented insight into how emotions—such as generosity, greed, fear, and well-being—impact economic decision-making.
As George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist from Carnegie Mellon University, confirmed: “Most of the brain is dominated by automatic processes, rather than deliberate thinking. A lot of what happens in the brain is emotional, not cognitive.”14
IT COMES AS no surprise that once neuroimaging had snagged the attention of the advertising world, it would find its way into other disciplines, too. In fact, politics, law enforcement, economics, and even Hollywood were already in on the action.
Politicians’ interest in the fMRI—well, you could almost see it coming. Committees spend up to a billion dollars handcrafting an electable presidential candidate—and elections are increasingly won and lost by the tiniest fraction of a percentage point. Imagine having at your disposal a tool that could possibly pinpoint what goes on in the brains of registered voters. If you were involved in a campaign, you’d want to use it, right? Or so Tom Freedman, a strategist and senior advisor to the Clinton administration, must have thought when he founded a company known as FKF Applied Research. FKF is devoted to studying decision-making processes, and how the brain responds to leadership qualities. In 2003, his company used fMRI scanning to analyze public responses to campaign commercials during the run-up to the Bush-Kerry presidential campaign.
Freedman’s test subjects looked at a selection of commercials for incumbent president George W. Bush and Massachusetts senator John Kerry; photographs of each candidate; images of the September 11 World Trade Center terrorist attacks; and former president Lyndon