25. June 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From UCLA press release on EurekAlert!…

‘Neuroscientists can predict your behavior better than you can

Surprising UCLA brain scanning study has implications for advertising, public health campaigns

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” — John Wanamaker, 19th-century U.S. department store pioneer

In a study with implications for the advertising industry and public health organizations, UCLA neuroscientists have shown they can use brain scanning to predict whether people will use sunscreen during a one-week period even better than the people themselves can.

“There is a very long history within psychology of people not being very good judges of what they will actually do in a future situation,” said the study’s senior author, Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA professor of psychology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences. “Many people ‘decide’ to do things but then don’t do them.”

The new study by Lieberman and lead author Emily Falk, who earned her doctorate in psychology from UCLA this month, shows that increased activity in a brain region called the medial prefrontal cortex among individuals viewing and listening to public service announcement slides on the importance of using sunscreen strongly indicated that these people were more likely to increase their use of sunscreen the following week, even beyond the people’s own expectations.

“From this region of the brain, we can predict for about three-quarters of the people whether they will increase their use of sunscreen beyond what they say they will do,” Lieberman said. “If you just go by what people say they will do, you get fewer than half of the people accurately predicted, and using this brain region, we could do significantly better.”

“While most people’s self-reports are not very accurate, they do not realize their self-reports are wrong so often in predicting future behavior,” Falk said. “It is surprising to find out that some technique might be able to predict my own behavior better than I can. Yet the brain seems to reveal something important that we may not even realize.”

The study, the first persuasion study in neuroscience to predict behavior change, appears June 23 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

For the study, Falk, Lieberman and their collaborators sought people who did not use sunscreen every day. The study group consisted of 20 participants, mostly UCLA students, 10 female and 10 male. The participants had their brains scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at UCLA’s Ahmanson–Lovelace Brain Mapping Center as they saw and heard a series of public service announcements. They were also asked about their intentions to use sunscreen over the next week and their attitudes about sunscreen.

The participants were then contacted a week later and asked on how many days during the week they had used sunscreen.

Lieberman and Falk focused on part of the brain’s medial prefrontal cortex, which is located in the front of the brain, between the eyebrows. This brain region is associated with self-reflection — thinking about what we like and do not like and our motivations and desires.

“It is the one region of the prefrontal cortex that we know is disproportionately larger in humans than in other primates,” Lieberman said. “This region is associated with self-awareness and seems to be critical for thinking about yourself and thinking about your preferences and values.”

The researchers developed a model based on 10 people and tested it on the next 10. They shuffled the 20 people in different ways to test the model. There are more than 180,000 ways to divide the 20 people into groups, Falk said.

“We ran a simulation of the 180,000 combinations, developed our model on the first 10 subjects on each of the 180,000 simulations, and tested it on the second 10,” Falk said. “We saw a very reliable relationship, where for the vast majority of the 180,000 ways to divide the group up, this one region of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex, does a very good job of predicting sunscreen use in the second group.”

This finding could be relevant to many public health organizations, as well as the advertising industry, Lieberman and Falk said.

“For advertisers, there may be a lot more that is knowable than is known, and this is a data-driven method for knowing more about how to create persuasive messages,” said Lieberman, one of the founders of social cognitive neuroscience.

Neural focus groups

While 19th-century department store pioneer John Wanamaker (quoted at the beginning of this release) advertised effectively for his stores in newspapers, he still said he was wasting half his advertising budget — only he didn’t know which half.

“We’re learning something about which half,” Lieberman said.

While advertising agencies often use focus groups to test commercials and movie trailers, in the future they and public health officials perhaps should add “neural focus groups” to test which messages will be effective while monitoring the brain activity of their subjects.

“A problem with standard focus groups,” Falk said, “is that people are lousy at reporting what they will actually do. We have not had much to supplement that approach, but in the future it may be possible to create what we are calling ‘neural focus groups.’ Instead of talking with people about what they think they will do, a public health or advertising agency can study their brains and learn what they are really likely to do and how an advertisement would be likely to affect millions of other people as well.”

“Given that there are emerging technologies that are relatively portable and approximate some of what fMRI can do at a fraction of the cost, looking to the brain to shape persuasive messages could become a reality,” Lieberman said. “But we’re just at the beginning. This is one of the first papers on anything like this. There will be a series of papers over the next 10 years or more that will tell us what factors are driving neural responses.”

“We hope to build a sophisticated model of persuasion that may incorporate multiple brain regions,” said Falk, who studies the neural basis of persuasion and attitude change. She has been hired by the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor as an assistant professor of communication studies and psychology and a member of the university’s Institute for Social Research, starting in September.

While some people have emphasized reasoning and emotion as key areas on which to base advertising campaigns, a key question may be whether messages and advertisements can be produced that “make people feel, ‘This is about me and is relevant to my preferences and motivations,’” Falk said. “Perhaps effective messages reinforce our values, our self-identity, what motivates us. We will learn much more as we continue this line of research over the years.”

Neuroscientists will learn whether they can predict behavior better and are likely to obtain a more nuanced understanding of the roles played by different parts of brain regions, said Falk, who this March received UCLA’s Charles E. and Sue K. Young Award for outstanding research and teaching. She is interested in how to make more effective health and other public service messages aimed at young adults.

“There is still much we do not know about how to get people to make healthier choices,” Falk said. “We hope to learn much more about what makes messages more or less persuasive.”

Different brain regions may be important for persuading people to tell or e-mail their friends about a health message, product or service; Lieberman and Falk are studying this issue of “creating buzz” as well.

However, the implications of the research go far beyond advertising, Lieberman said.

“There are many applications beyond how you make a good 30-second commercial,” he said, “including how teachers can communicate better so their students won’t tune out or how doctors can convince patients to stick to their instructions. We all use persuasion in some form or another every day.”

Beware of hucksters

Some people are already offering “neuro-marketing,” purporting to help businesses sell their products and help candidates run their advertising campaigns, Lieberman noted. They may, for example, recommend what colors and sounds to use in commercials. Is this effective, or are they claiming expertise they do not possess?

“In general, they are taking simple views of how different parts of the brain work and are saying it is important to turn a particular part of the brain on when advertising, and therefore you should do more of this or that,” Lieberman said. “For instance, they will say you want to activate the amygdala because that is the brain’s emotion center. Typically they are not looking at the relationship between what happens in the brain when someone is exposed to an advertisement and what actually are the outcomes that you care about. For example, do people change their behavior? Does someone spread the message to others? Instead, they are giving generic analysis, and my guess is that the vast majority of the advice they are giving is not accurate.

“To really understand the relationship between the brain’s responses to brands and persuasive materials and desirable outcomes, you actually have to measure the outcomes that are desirable and not just say what should work,” he said. “There are many folks claiming to be neuroscientists who have read a little introductory neuroscience, and that is not enough expertise. It’s almost infinitely more complicated than that.”

Co-authors on the Journal of Neuroscience paper are Elliot Berkman, a UCLA graduate student of psychology in Lieberman’s laboratory who will be an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon this fall; Traci Mann, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota–Minneapolis who was formerly on UCLA’s faculty; and Brittany Harrison, a former UCLA undergraduate student.’

John’s Thoughts…

Okay, so I love this study. This excites the hell out of me. The idea that we are finally at the point of using neuroscientific tools to be able to somewhat accurately predict human behavior is astounding.

However, here is the pitfall with this particular study. The researchers have said several times that humans are notoriously bad at self-report. In other words, we are not very good at telling other people what we will do or what we have done. We know memory is unreliable and varies according to what emotional state we are in at the present moment. We know we are poor predictors of how we will behave in the future. We know we don’t do well at predicting how future events will make us feel.

 And yet, the release says, ‘participants were then contacted a week later and asked on how many days during the week they had used sunscreen.’

So we don’t truly know how frequently people had used sunscreen because their recollections will vary based on how they were feeling at the moment they reported that information.

And I’ve been here before from a researcher’s perspective and it’s a maddening chicken and egg scenario.

The other problem I see coming down the road is the ethical debate. I am absolutely for the development of this technology with the assumption that it will be used for constructive, socially desirable messaging. And that is a BIG assumption. Once the technology is fully developed, anyone can get their hands on it. Once the technology is in the hands of individuals who lack ethics, values and social and emotional awareness, we’ve got a serious problem. Because then the technology will be used to craft powerful, predictive messages that are fueled by nothing more than revenue. That is dangerous.

The next step, in my mind, is to teach more individuals social and emotional awareness so that more are acting towards the greater good, more are joining the advanced human team, more are aware of their top values AND acting in accordance with them. Only when we reach this plateau of human development will such technologies have a chance of fulfilling their idealistic promises (and I’m all for idealism!).

In any case, I’m still excited about the study. I think they’ve done tremendous work and this is the harbinger of a new vista in neuroscience. Congratulations to the team at UCLA!

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Award-winning author, founder of Guide To Self

Real Men, Real Emotions, Real Potential

http://drjohnsblog.wordpress.com

Posted in Neuropsychology, Awareness, Danville CA, Memory and recall, Neuromarketing, San Francisco Bay Area, Subconscious mind, Consciousness, Innovative brand research, Dr. John Schinnerer, Unique marketing research, Chief Marketing Officer, Customer Engagement, Brand Equity, Business & psych | Print | No Comments »

10. June 2010 by John Schinnerer.

If you’ve been following my blog, Shrunken Mind, you’re aware of the vast power of the unconscious mind - that part of the mind which I refer to as the ‘back office’ of the mind. In the ‘back office’, activites take place that are automatic, uncontrolled and outside of your conscious awareness. Despite this, the workings of the unconscious mind have a profound effect on the consious mind and on your behavior. In science, we’ve been working on figuring this out over the past 20 years with the help of fMRIs and MRIs.

There are a few areas of expertise that continually seem to be at the cutting edge of this area of expertise - sales and marketing. Up until recently this has only been of some concern to me, as I stay on the bleeding edge of the area and can afford some awareness and protection to myself, my family and my clients.

However, a new study came out this week which caused me great concern. Check out the snippet from the article from New Scientist and see if you agree.

‘Unconscious purchasing urges revealed by brain scans

 15:56 09 June 2010 by Ewen Callaway   You spend more time window shopping than you may realise. Whether someone intends to buy a product or not can be predicted from their brain activity – even when they are not consciously pondering their choices.The ability to predict from brain scans alone what a person intends to buy, while leaving the potential buyer none the wiser, could bring much-needed rigour to efforts to meld marketing and neuroscience, says Brian Knutson, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California who was not involved in the research.Neuromarketing, as this field is known, has been employed by drug firms, Hollywood studios and even the Campbell Soup Company to sell their wares, despite little published proof of its effectiveness.

Rather than soup, John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany, attempted to predict which cars people might unconsciously favour. To do so, he and colleague Anita Tusche used functional MRI to scan the brains of two groups of male volunteers, aged 24 to 32, while they were presented with images of a variety of cars.One group was asked to rate their impressions of the vehicles, while the second performed a distracting visual task while cars were presented in the background. Each volunteer was then shown three cars and asked which they would prefer to buy.

First impressions

The researchers found that when volunteers first viewed the car that they would subsequently “buy”, specific patterns of brain activity could be seen in the brain’s medial prefrontal and insula cortices – areas that are all associated with preferences and emotion.These patterns of activity reflected the volunteers’ subsequent purchasing choice nearly three-quarters of the time, whether or not the subjects had given their undivided attention to the images of the cars when they were first shown them.Previous studies have shown similar patterns of activity when we make explicit purchasing choices. What this new study suggests is that these brain regions size up products even when we are not consciously making purchasing decisions. The brain appears to be imparting automatic or possibly even unconscious value onto products, as soon as you’re exposed to them, says Haynes.

Secret desires

While Knutson acknowledges that the volunteers’ choices might have been different if they had been making a real decision about which car to buy, he reckons the study may still be of use to neuromarketers – specifically as a subjective way of determining whether a consumer might buy a product or not, without having to be explicitly asked.’

For the full article, click here.

In the past, I’ve been involved in some neuromarketing and emotion studies with large health care providers and consumer goods manufacturers. At the time, it was fascinating, compelling and educational. The more I get to know about it, the more concerned I become. TV commercials, billboards, radio spots and magazine ads already have sufficient influence over our minds to make me highly uncomfortable. My unease is only reinforced by the piles of studies showing how Madison Avenue is influencing the ‘back office’ of our minds.

To protect yourself and your families, my best suggestion is pause the TV during commercials and skip over them if you have TIVO (or the equivalent. Even if you have TIVO, studies have shown the brain recognizes roughly 30% of the content of TV ads even when you are skipping through the commercials at high speed!

If you don’t, at least mute the radio or TV during commercials. From what we know in science, the brain is malleable like a lump of clay. And these commercials leave tracks in the brain like running a finger tip through wet clay. The more you are exposed, the deeper the groove becomes in the clay (your brain) and the more influence they have over you. Don’t let your children mindlessly watch tv commercials.

Your brain is impressionable. Guard it. Be mindful.

All the best,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Teaching Real Men Real Emotions

Guide To Self, Inc.

Award-winning author

Award-winning blogger

Keynote speaker

Posted in Visual Attention, Unsconscious mind, Subliminal messages, Danville CA, Brain plasticity, Visual perception, Neuromarketing, Real Men Real Emotion, Well-being, San Francisco Bay Area, National speakers, Awareness, Innovative brand research, Emotional IQ, Dr. John Schinnerer, Measuring emotions, Chief Marketing Officer, Brand Equity, Mindfulness, Organizational psychology, Subconscious mind, Consciousness, Business & psych | Print | No Comments »

20. October 2009 by John Schinnerer.

ScienceDaily (Oct. 19, 2009) — Most of us won’t respond to the call of adventure while soaking in a relaxing bath. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, we’re more likely to book a weekend at a spa. 

“Imagine you are sitting in a bathtub, listening to calm music with gentle candlelight. Add lavender aroma. Then as you flip through a magazine, you come across an advertisement from an amusement park, promising you an exciting place full of adventurous offerings. How appealing would you find the prospect of visiting this amusement park?” write authors Hakkyun Kim (University of Concordia, Canada), Kiwan Park (Seoul National University, Korea), and Norbert Schwarz (University of Michigan). 

The authors found that people evaluate vacation products with adventurous appeals more favorably when they feel excited rather than peaceful, and vice versa. They found that processing advertising claims depends much on the consistency between the message and the consumer’s mood. 

The authors explain that people who see an advertisement that promises an exciting vacation ask themselves, “Would this vacation really make me feel that way?” They are more likely to think a vacation will really be exciting when they currently feel excited rather than peaceful. In other words, incidental emotions influence the perceived likelihood that the product will deliver on its emotional promises: When the current emotions match the promises of the product, people infer that it may really make them feel that way; but when the current emotions mismatch the promises, the discrepancy between their current feelings and the promises suggests that the product may fail to deliver what it promises. 

The researchers’ results suggest that marketers can facilitate the impression that products will deliver on their promises by displaying them in contexts in which consumers’ pre-existing feelings are likely to match the product’s claims. “Exciting sports events are a better arena for advertising exciting vacations than for advertising serene vacations, not only because an exciting vacation may match the audience’s general preferences, but also because an exciting vacation will match the audience’s current feelings,” the authors conclude.

For full article, please click here.

I suppose this makes accurate emotional measurement all the more important. Check out the work I’ve been doing with Resonance Strategies. Great work for marketing, branding, and change initiatives for those who aren’t too fearful. In the consulting work I’ve done, I’ve foudn that dealing with emotions in a business climate sends most business people running for the hills. It’s not rational, it’s emotional! Despite their fears, emotion is still a larger part of the human mind that reason (roughly 90-10%) and dominates most decision-making.

The next step will be matching internal branding campaigns to employee emotions to ensure greater employee productivity. Do I hear individualized internal branding calling? What about individualized external branding and advertising to match ads to consumer emotions and moods?

Savor the day!

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Posted in National speakers, Organizational psychology, Emotional mind, Danville CA, Emotion & productivity, Executive coach, Subliminal messages, Employee engagement, Rational mind, Customer Engagement, Guide to Self, Dr. John Schinnerer, Measuring emotions, Innovative brand research, Unique marketing research, Brand Equity, Chief Marketing Officer, Positive Psychology | Print | No Comments »

1. October 2009 by John Schinnerer.

Science Daily

‘Today, the journal Emotion publishes a study by a UCL team led by Professor Nilli Lavie, which provides evidence that people are able to process emotional information from subliminal images and demonstrates conclusively that even under such conditions, information of negative value is better detected than information of positive value.

In the study, Professor Lavie and colleagues showed fifty participants a series of words on a computer screen. Each word appeared on-screen for only a fraction of second – at times only a fiftieth of a second, much too fast for the participants to consciously read the word. The words were either positive (e.g. cheerful, flower and peace), negative (e.g. agony, despair and murder) or neutral (e.g. box, ear or kettle). After each word, participants were asked to choose whether the word was neutral or ‘emotional’ (i.e. positive or negative), and how confident they were of their decision.

The researchers found that the participants answered most accurately when responding to negative words – even when they believed they were merely guessing the answer.

‘There has been much speculation about whether people can process emotional information unconsciously, for example pictures, faces and words,’ says Professor Lavie. ‘We have shown that people can perceive the emotional value of subliminal messages and have demonstrated conclusively that people are much more attuned to negative words.’

‘Clearly, there are evolutionary advantages to responding rapidly to emotional information. We can’t wait for our consciousness to kick in if we see someone running towards us with a knife or if we drive under rainy or foggy weather conditions and see a sign warning ‘danger’.’

This is a favorite subject of mine - the unconscious mind and things that affect it. Priming is an amazing example where the unconscious mind is influenced by messages that are flashed for less than .33 seconds (the point at which a stimulus is too quick for our eyes to consciously pick up and be aware of). The unconscious mind can be dramatically influenced by subliminal messages, and even sentences in which the words are mixed up.

When I present, I make a point of using such techniques to lead the audience to a more positive emotional state (e.g., joy, contentment, curiosity, awe, surprise, pride, happiness, or interest). I always tell the audience what I am doing and why. Then I let them know just how easy it is to influence the mind by way of these techniques. The scariest part, to me, is that Madison Avenue is aware of such techniques as well. And while there are laws to prevent the use of subliminal messages in advertising. There are no laws of which I know that prohibit techniques such as scrambling the words in a sentence or the letters in a word as was recently done in a Kaiser Permanente Thrive campaign ad. Fortunately, the word that is scrambled is ‘thrive’ so, in my mind, there is little or no negative impact on viewers.

However, it is to our benefit that we be mindful, cautious and aware of these techniques that speak to the unconscious mind as they do influence our behaviors, often outside of our conscious awareness.

Stay awake!

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Guide To Self, Inc.

Positive Psychology Coach

Posted in Awareness, Mindfulness, National speakers, Emotion & learning, Subliminal messages, Danville CA, Subconscious mind, Consciousness, Innovative brand research, Dr. John Schinnerer, Unique marketing research, Brand Equity, Emotional management, Emotional mind, Positive Psychology | Print | No Comments »

11. June 2008 by John Schinnerer.

Most people like to enjoy the illusion that they are rational consumers. However, more and more studies are demonstrating the powerful impact that emotions play in buying decisions. In a recent study in the Journal of Consumer Research, researchers found that customers in an angry mood make different purchasing decisions than customers in a sad mood, demonstrating that negative emotions vary in how they influence consumer decision-making.  

Angry Mood Makes Consumers More Likely to Stick to Their Guns 

Angry consumers were 37% more likely to stick with their existing choices than sad individuals. In other words, angry individuals are less likely to see the advantages or benefits of a new product or service. People in an irritable or angry mood become cognitively rigid, which is to say, their neural nets are knotted. Until they calm down, new information will be ignored. 

Sad Mood Still Open to Options  On the other hand, individuals who were sad behaved the same as those in a neutral mood (i.e., a 5 on a 1 to 10 scale) when it came to consumer decision making. In contrast, folks in a funk (i.e., sad sacks) have a tendency to look at options closely and carefully and then make the best decision based on the information at hand.  Take Home Message   Different negative emotions influence behavior differently yet predictably. If you know how someone is feeling, you can predict (within a certain range) how they will behave.  For example, if you sell consumer packaged goods, you are more likely to sell new products to sad consumers than angry ones. Individuals in an angry mood are significantly more likely to stick with status quo. Angry peoples’ thoughts comingle with, and are influenced by, an angry mood. As a result, they tend to overfocus and dwell on their anger and, typically, do not look at options or possibilities.  A mood of sadness or melancholy gives one the chance to reflect and a willingness to ponder a variety of possibilities. This is typically done in an attempt to self-correct one’s mood towards a neutral middle ground.  Conclusion  As an individual, be wary of making any important decisions when you are angry. You could be missing some fantastic opportunities! As a corporation, have your finger continuously on the pulse of how your customers feel.  Awareness of the mood of the consumer can lead to a more engaging, pleasant and profitable relationship.  John Schinnerer, Ph.D.Emotion Mining Company, Inc.

www.EmotionMining.com

Incidental and Task-Related Affect: A Re-Inquiry and Extension of the Influence of Choice. Journal of Consumer Research. June 2005.

Author Information

Dr. Schinnerer is Chief Communication Officer at Emotion Mining Company, which has a powerful method to accurately quantify emotions to help craft successful change initiatives, improve brand equity, increase effectiveness of marketing campaigns, remove roadblocks to team building and allow for new scientific research.  The EM method was designed and fine-tuned over the last 15 years by a Stanford psychiatrist and neuroscientist and tested with Fortune 500 companies, such as AOL, Coke, Penske, Campbell’s, and Purina, with unparalleled results.In the past, Dr. Schinnerer has served as President of Guide To Self (http://www.guidetoself.com), a company that focuses on executive coaching and positive psychology.  Dr. Schinnerer also hosted Guide To Self Radio, a prime time radio show on positive psychology and emotional management.  Dr. Schinnerer started in the private sector as President of Infinet Assessment (http://www.infinetassessment.com), a psychological testing company to help firms select the best applicants. Dr. Schinnerer wrote the book “Guide To Self: The Beginner’s Guide To Managing Emotion and Thought” (Available at Amazon.com, Target.com and BarnesAndNoble.com) and many articles such as “The Marketing Revolution: Connecting Behavior with the Subconscious Mind.” His book was awarded “Best Self-Help Book of 2007.” 

Posted in Chief Marketing Officer, Organizational change initiatives, Brand Equity, Customer Engagement, Infinet Assessment, Unique marketing research, Innovative brand research, Business & psych, Dr. John Schinnerer, Guide to Self, Emotional IQ, Positive Psychology | Print | No Comments »