Neuroscience Research

Can an initial rejection actually help you get the "yes" you really want? Surprisingly, if you create the right first and second requests, it can. Persuasion expert Robert Cialdini conducted a classic experiment that demonstrates the…

It's been more than a year since I posted the first Neuromarketing Challenge, and we've just now received our first response. The challenge, in case you missed that post, was for neuromarketing firms to submit a detailed case study or…

It's been a few weeks, so here are the latest articles from my Brainy Marketing blog at Forbes.com. Please drop by there and make a comment - Forbes has a cool comment exposure system that lets authors of posts (e.g., me) "call out"…

Hiring a social media manager or a salesperson? Maybe you should have the finalists' brains scanned in an fMRI. A larger orbital prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with decision-making and cognitive processing, has been…

When salespeople hope to close a deal, they may try doing favors for the client. In fact, scientists who study human behavior know that the opposite strategy can work: if you can get someone to do YOU a small favor, they are much more…

When can a Mountain Dew make you smarter than a glass of a nice Pinot Noir? Well, beyond the short-term cognitive boost from the caffeine-rich soft drink, being seen holding a glass of wine can reduce your intelligence - not in real terms,…

The way you display a price has a surprising effect on how consumers gauge the magnitude of the price. It's important to read the price aloud as a consumer might, as more syllables in the price make it seem higher.

While just about every educator would agree that highly engaged students learn more than bored, distracted students, there's been little effort to measure engagement. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has begun to change that with a…

Why is DARPA paying academic researchers to study how Hitchcock suspense films and Clint Eastwood westerns light up our brains?

Having demolished the belief that most people are rational in his last two books, Duke researcher Dan Ariely puts to death the concept that "most people are honest" in his newest book, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to…