Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect by Lieberman Matthew D

Author:Lieberman, Matthew D. [Lieberman, Matthew D.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307889119
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2013-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

Neural Focus Groups

John Wanamaker, a nineteenth-century pioneer of retail sales, once quipped, “I know I’m wasting half of my advertising budget.… I just don’t know which half.” Ever since, people have been trying to predict which advertising campaigns will succeed or fail before committing their advertising dollars. In truth, we aren’t very good at figuring this out because the typical method involves asking a “focus group” what they think. Does this ad make you want to buy the product? Do you think it will make other people want to buy it too? Which of these two spokesmen made you want the product more? Focus groups don’t work all that well because people don’t actually have introspective access to the answers to these questions. Using a focus group might be better than throwing darts at a dart-board in a dark room—but not much.

Based on our sunscreen study, Emily Falk and I suspected that it might be possible to create a neural focus group from which we gathered neural responses elicited in response to ads in order to predict how successful the ads would be when they were aired on television. Our first step in doing this was to replicate the sunscreen study, but this time we used antismoking ads shown to people who were about to attempt to quit smoking. We measured the amount of carbon monoxide in their lungs the day we scanned them (that is, before quitting) and a month later as a biological measure of how much they were smoking at each point in time. Our sunscreen results replicated beautifully: while participants watched the antismoking ads, activity in the same region of the MPFC predicted successful smoking reductions much better than the participants’ self-reported beliefs and intentions.

The next thing we did was separate the ads based on the advertising campaign that they came from. The ads came from three different campaigns that had aired in different states at different times during the year. I’ll call them campaigns A, B, and C. Simulating a focus group, we asked each of our smokers which ads would be most effective in helping smokers quit. They told us that campaign B was the best, followed by A, with C coming in last. But when we looked at the activity in the MPFC in response to each ad campaign, we saw a very different pattern. The participants’ MPFC responded most strongly to campaign C and least strongly to campaign A. In other words our subjects told us that the ads from campaign C were the worst, but their brains told us these same ads might in fact be the most effective.

How could we tell which was right—people’s words, their MPFC responses, or perhaps neither? Luckily, each of the ads ended with a specific request of viewers: “Call 1-800-QUIT-NOW.” This is the National Cancer Institute’s antismoking hotline, and through our public health partners on this project, we were able to find out how many people called this number after seeing one of the ad campaigns.

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