Neuro-Alarmism at Popular Mechanics

It’s Halloween, so Popular Mechanics must want to scare its readers. The magazine has thrown fuel on the fire of neuro-alarmism by running a November issue cover story by Jeff Wise talking about “digital thought police” and filled with frightening prospects of obligatory brain scans in criminal cases, fMRI police interrogations, and manipulative neuromarketing. The [...]

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Why Percentages Don’t Add Up

Which is scarier – undergoing a potentially fatal surgical procedure that has a 95% survival rate, or one that causes death in 1 out of 20 patients? If you are like most people, you would find the latter statistic far more worrisome, even though mathematically the two statements are the same. A variety of research [...]

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Smiles Really DO Boost Sales

What’s the first thing a manager teaches a new retail or food service employee? Maybe “Don’t steal the cash!” is first, but right after that is, “Smile at the customer!” It turns out that this is probably even better advice than one might think. Continuing our exploration of subliminal stimuli and their effects on behavior, [...]

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Careers in Neuromarketing

Science Magazine has blessed neuromarketing and neuroeconomics by citing them as “interesting niche areas” in neuroscience research. Emma Hitt’s article notes, “The subject areas that qualify as neuroscience are as far-reaching and as interconnected as neurons themselves. Consequently, neuroscientists often work on questions that span several distinct subfields. Many neuroscience programs are interdepartmental and take [...]

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Subliminal Branding in Milliseconds

We are subjected to a constant stream of branding messages – company logos, brand emblems, and even distinctive designs are, quite literally, everywhere. In addition to conventional advertising media, it seems that just about every item that can be used to convey a message has been pressed into service. The net effect of this barrage [...]

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Emotional Design

At a conference presentation last week (see Neuromarketing in Montreal), I made the point that the most important frontier for neuromarketers may be product design. Why struggle to make ads more appealing when you could be making the product itself more appealing by tapping into the consumer’s true feelings and reactions? According to a WIRED.com [...]

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Ignore Your Brain and Get Rich

The subtitle of Your Money & Your Brain by Jason Zweig (Simon & Schuster, 340pp) is How The New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Make You Rich. No doubt the publishers needed to spice up the cover a bit, because the book might have been better subtitled, “How to stop your brain from screwing up a [...]

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Legal Decision Making Center Funded

Decision making is emerging as a key area of neuroscience research. Neuroeconomics and neuromarketing are informed by brain scan data and other studies of how people make decisions, and now Vanderbilt University is the home for a major new study of how legal decisions are influenced by neurological processes. The first-of-its-kind project, which is a [...]

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Five Keys to Selling to Spendthrifts

Neuroeconomics research suggests that roughly 15% of your consumers are “spendthrifts” – they have unusually low sensitivity to the pain of paying, i.e., the neural discomfort associated with parting with money. Selling to people who feel little or no buying pain should be easy, right? With reduced buying inhibition, a spendthrift is more likely to [...]

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Damage Control That Causes More Damage

Usually marketers concentrate on getting their own message out, but sometimes it seems necessary to respond to the claims of others. The most annoying of these situations are claims or rumors that are totally false. What should one do if, for example, an activist group makes false allegations that your product causes cancer or is [...]

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