Unconscious Buying

In a fascinating study just published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers have shown that we make buying decisions even when we aren't paying attention to the products, and that fMRI observation of brain activity can predict…

Brain Fight: Who’s the Decider?

One of my favorite chapters in How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer is The Brain is an Argument. In this chapter, Lehrer highlights how complex our decision-making process really is, and how competing options battle for supremacy.

Sexy Pics Beat Ugly Spiders

  Erotic images sell better than pictures of office supplies, and a lot better than photos of hairy spiders. Who knew? Actually, that's a bit of an oversimplification. Stanford researchers led by neuroeconomics prof Brian Knutson have…

AdAge: Neuromarketing or Neurohype?

Advertising Age's Mya Frazier has taken neuromarketing to task in Hidden Persuasion or Junk Science? Despite the alarming title, the article itself is reasonably balanced in content if not in tone. Frazier highlights some of the same…

Contest Marketing: Beating the Odds

In This is Your Brain on Money, I mentioned that I'd visit some of the other neuromarketing-related topics raised in Jason Zweig's interesting article in Money, Your money and your brain. One of these is that our brains are programmed for…

This is Your Brain on Money

The human mind may be well suited to surviving in dangerous forests and plains, but it doesn't do as well with modern financial decisions. A lengthy and interesting article in Money by Jason Zweig (read it online at CNNMoney.com - Your…

The Pain of Buying

We recently reported on important new neuroeconomics research in Brain Scans Predict Buying Behavior. This study is the first that attempts to correlate fMRI brain scan data with actual purchasing behavior. George Loewenstein of Carnegie…

Brain Scans Predict Buying Behavior

Only a day ago, in our post Neuro-Hype, we lamented the abundance of brain scan hype and the dearth of research that examines real purchase behavior. As if on cue, Carnegie Mellon University released Researchers Use Brain Scans To Predict…