Chapter 22

Neuromarketing Ethics, Standards, and Public Policy Implications

In This Chapter

Making sure neuromarketing is done ethically

Seeing how the neuromarketing industry is developing standards and practices

Understanding some important legal questions about neuromarketing

Considering the idea that neuromarketing may actually be good for you

In this chapter, we look at some important topics that surround neuromarketing — rules and principles for ethical conduct, standards and practices for transparency and acceptance, and legal and public policy implications for future directions.

Neuromarketing is a young field that’s just beginning to emerge from what we call its “Wild West” period. During those early days, there was a lot of hype and hokum on display, coming both from some early practitioners and some overzealous commentators. This is not unusual for a new field, but it has left some bruises that haven’t completely healed. Today, the field is maturing and beginning to develop many of the trappings of an established research community, such as dedicated “tracks” in mainstream research conferences, its own dedicated industry groups, the development of standards and guidelines, the appearance of more peer-reviewed research, and a slow but steady absorption of neuromarketing methods into the research offerings of large, mainstream research providers.

We begin with a look at ethical practices for neuromarketing in three key areas: protecting research participants, representing neuromarketing to the media, and providing evidence of validity to potential buyers. Then we examine progress in the development of industry standards and accreditation of neuromarketing vendors. Next, we cover some legal questions relating to the regulation of neuromarketing. We end with an overview of three public policy areas where we believe neuromarketing can play a positive role: public service advertising, public policy design, and education.

Doing Neuromarketing Ethically

We don’t mention a lot of articles in this book, but one we have to reference here is “Neuroethics of Neuromarketing,” by Emily R. Murphy, Judy Illes, and Peter B. Reiner, three neuro-ethicists associated with the National Core for Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia and the Stanford Law School, published in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour in 2008. This article was one of the first publications to lay out ethical guidelines for neuromarketing, and it has become something of a touchstone in the field.

Murphy, Illes, and Reiner propose a preliminary code of ethics for neuromarketers that we summarize in this section under three general topics: protecting the rights of participants, talking responsibly to the media, and being honest with clients and customers.

Protecting the rights of research participants

“Neuroethics of Neuromarketing” identifies three aspects of protecting the rights of research participants:

Protection of research subjects: Many research subject protections are mandated by law in most nations, but only for government-sponsored research. In the United States, policies for federally funded human subjects research are specified by the Department of Health and Human Services. These policies require that all research involving human subjects be conducted under the approval of an institutional (or independent) review board (IRB). Policies the IRB must approve (and re-approve annually) include

• Procedures for acquiring informed consent of participants

• Provisions for ensuring subject information confidentiality

• Explicit protocols for dealing with incidental findings (medical conditions discovered in a subject as a byproduct of data collection)

Although federally funded scientists working in academic, government, or commercial settings have a legal responsibility to obtain informed consent and protect the privacy of their human research subjects, these legal requirements may not apply to private neuromarketing firms that do not employ federally funded staff or engage in federally funded research. In such cases, we believe the neuromarketing firm still has an ethical obligation to offer equivalent levels of protection. The best way to do this is to acquire IRB approval for research procedures and data protection policies (many IRBs can be commissioned to provide the appropriate level of review for commercial, for-profit research entities).

IRB requirements are very detailed, and submissions can run to hundreds of pages of documentation. However, this should be considered a cost of doing business by neuromarketing vendors. Failure to have IRB approval is a sign that a neuromarketing firm may not be serious about its commitment to the highest research standards and ethics.

Additional subject protection considerations include making sure that competition for participants doesn’t cause financial incentives to get so high that they become a form of indirect coercion. Also, as part of informed consent, subjects must be advised and reminded of their right to withdraw from any study for any reason, including even minor discomfort. Although most technologies used by neuromarketing have minimal risk, these risks need to be spelled out in detail before informed consent is requested.

Protection of vulnerable niche populations from marketing exploitation: Policies for research subjects’ protection should include additional ethics review and safeguards for research done on protected or potentially vulnerable subject populations. In addition, neuromarketing-influenced advertising targeted at specific protected consumer groups should aim to positively serve the special needs of the population without marginalizing, maligning, or otherwise causing harm, whether psychosocial or financial in nature.

Protected and vulnerable subject populations include people like children, pregnant women, mothers of young children, students, and people with mental or physical illnesses. This is a difficult guideline to implement because neuromarketing does not control marketing, a point introduced in Chapter 1. In addition, defining what constitutes “harm” is not as easy as it may seem. For these reasons and others, many neuromarketing firms have adopted the policy to refuse to do research with children at all, to avoid any possibility or perception of exploitation. Policies with regard to other groups are less clear.

Full disclosure of goals, risks, and benefits: Disclosure can be achieved through the publication of a vendor’s ethics principles regarding protecting the privacy and rights of human subjects and consumers.

Several neuromarketing vendors publish statements of ethics principles on their websites. More important, industry associations have begun to craft general principles for neuromarketing research to which members must subscribe, similar to published ethics principles addressing other forms of research. Among these efforts, three are worth noting by name:

The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF; www.thearf.org) is developing a set of "NeuroStandards" for ethical and scientifically sound use of neuromarketing in advertising research.

The ESOMAR (www.esomar.org) has published a guideline for members called "36 Questions to Help Commission Neuroscience Research," which includes questions about ethics policies and principles.

The Neuromarketing Science & Business Association (NMSBA; www.neuromarketing-association.com), the first global industry group devoted exclusively to neuromarketing, has published a "Code of Ethics for the Application of Neuroscience in Business" that covers topics such as transparency, consent, and privacy.

Representing research accurately in media and marketing

This has been an area of some controversy in the neuromarketing field, although the situation has gotten much better as the industry has emerged from its “Wild West” period. In the early days of neuromarketing, some vendors clearly overreached in making claims about what neuromarketing can do. Among those claims were declarations that neuromarketing can be used to trigger a “buy button” in the brain to create advertising that consumers cannot resist. Other vendors claimed they could accurately predict a consumer’s “propensity to purchase” by reading his or her brain waves in a single session of watching an ad. Not surprisingly, claims like these set off alarm bells in both academic and consumer protection circles — from the first group because academics knew the claims were wildly overstated, and from the second because consumer advocates feared the claims might be true.

Over-interpretation of neuroimaging results from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have been a particular area of concern, in part because research (which, ironically, could be classified as neuromarketing research) has shown that when neuroscience explanations are accompanied by color-coded images of brain scans, even if the images are irrelevant to the explanation, the general public finds them to be much more persuasive than when images are absent.

Academic neuroscientists have been particularly critical of fMRI research in marketing and advertising that claims to identify “hot spots” in the brain where activity occurs during various tasks or mental states. This issue reached something of a boiling point in 2007 when an opinion piece appeared in The New York Times that purported to identify people’s attitudes toward political candidates based on fMRI brain scans. A group of 17 distinguished neuroscientists responded with a letter to the editor strongly objecting to the reported findings, arguing that it simply isn’t possible to definitively determine something as complicated as a political attitude by looking at activity in a particular brain region.

Murphy, Illes, and Reiner propose the following guidelines for communicating about neuromarketing in media and marketing presentations:

Accurate media and marketing representation: Neuromarketing companies bear the burden of accurately representing their wares in media and marketing materials. At a minimum, they should fully disclose their scientific methods and measures of validity in all mass media presentations such as invited opinions, editorials, and news reports.

They believe, and we concur, that adherence to a code of responsible communication and truth in advertising is necessary to sustain a positive and trusting public perception of brain science research, as well as promote the further development of effective neuromarketing technologies.

We also believe that neuromarketers have an obligation to maintain scientific transparency in media and marketing communications that goes beyond what is required of traditional market research providers, because their methods are so new and different and many of the underlying scientific principles are so counterintuitive. Indeed, this was one of our primary motivations in writing this book — to contribute to an explanation of the science behind neuromarketing that is accessible not only to marketing specialists but also to the general public.

Providing evidence of validity and reliability to potential buyers

We discuss the issues of validity and reliability in Chapter 19. Validity is about measuring the right thing; reliability is about measuring it right. Both are critical to the accuracy and generalizability of any form of quantitative research.

Murphy, Illes, and Reiner cover this topic in detail. Here is a partial summary of their recommendations (their term external validity is equivalent to our term reliability):

Internal and external validity: At a minimum, internal validity checks must be based on a sufficiently comprehensive research database to provide meaningful and effective results to neuromarketing consumers. Ensuring external and sustained validity requires neuromarketers to align their products and metrics with changing technologies and expanding neuroscience knowledge. Maintenance of safety and efficacy verification in neuromarketing research, development, and deployment is absolutely required.

The availability of a normative database (a collection of findings that compare a firm’s metrics to actual marketplace performance; see Chapter 19) is highly relevant to this issue of establishing and communicating validity. But it’s also worth noting that such a database can take years to build. Traditional research firms have a huge advantage here, because many of them have normative databases of survey questions and answers that go back decades. No neuromarketing vendor has yet published a peer-reviewed validation of its metrics based on normative data, although several have claimed to be working on such a project. In the meantime, how can neuromarketing vendors provide evidence of validity and reliability?

We recommend two interim approaches:

Vendors can show their commitment to keeping up with changing technologies and knowledge by acting as conduits between the brain sciences and the marketing community. By identifying and interpreting technology developments and new scientific findings of relevance to marketers, they simultaneously provide evidence of their ongoing immersion in real science and their commitment to making that science accessible to their client base of marketers and advertisers.

Vendors can do more to associate their methods with the growing body of findings now appearing in academic research that validate many of the core assumptions underlying neuromarketing. Here are four recent examples:

• In a series of articles published between 2008 and 2011, a group of Italian neuroscientists led by Laura Astolfi and Giovanni Vecchiato were able to predict memory and liking for advertising based on a combination of specific electroencephalography (EEG) brain-wave patterns, electrodermal activity, and heart rate.

• In 2012, Finnish researchers Niklas Ravaja and colleagues showed that brand purchase decisions can be predicted based on EEG asymmetries between the left and right hemispheres of the frontal cortex, validating a measure of emotional motivation used by many EEG-specialist neuromarketers.

• In another study published in 2012, neuroscientists Gregory Berns and Sara Moore used fMRI to predict the popularity of songs. Adolescents listened to a series of songs by relatively unknown artists while having their brains scanned. Three years later, the researchers correlated the scans with popularity, measured by the sales of these songs over the intervening three years. They found that sales correlated with activation in the reward centers of the brain of the small group tested, while expressed likeability of the songs was not predictive of eventual sales.

• In two articles published in 2011 and 2012, neuroscientists Emily Falk, Matthew Lieberman, and colleagues reported on smoking cessation advertising campaigns using fMRI. In their first published study, they found that subjects’ brain responses to ads were better predictors of smoking cessation than explicit opinions about the persuasiveness of the ads. In a second study, smokers and experts watched ads for three campaigns while being scanned, and then rated the campaigns in terms of their likely persuasive impact on smokers. When the campaigns were run in live markets, their effectiveness was rated by comparing call-in rates to a toll-free number. In all cases, brain activations predicted the relative success of the campaigns better than either smoker or expert opinions, showing that the neural responses of a small group of individuals can predict the behavior of large-scale populations, and do so better than expressed judgments, even those of experts in the field.

In order to bask in the validation “glow” of these studies (and others that are beginning to appear on a regular basis), neuromarketing vendors only need to communicate how they’re using the same or very similar techniques.

Unfortunately, this creates a problem for some vendors who insist on presenting their methods as a “black box” that contains proprietary techniques that are superior in performance to methods described transparently in peer-reviewed research papers. In the absence of convincing normative data that validates this assumption, these vendors are left in a bit of a pickle. We recommend that buyers of neuromarketing services treat black-box vendors with skepticism. Neuromarketing is evolving into a field that leverages established brain science as its foundation. Claims of superior performance with secret proprietary techniques are fading as a source of competitive advantage. More transparency is required in order for the neuromarketing field to adopt meaningful standards.

Moving the Industry toward “Neuro-Standards”

A sign of maturity in any science-based field is a migration away from categorical, sensationalist, and “unique” claims and toward standards, transparent practices, and accreditation among service providers. Neuromarketing is clearly evolving in this direction, but it has a ways to go.

Getting past the “Wild West” of early neuromarketing

In the early days of neuromarketing, as we mention earlier, something of a “Wild West” atmosphere pervaded the upstart field. Journalistic articles with titles like “In Search of the Buy Button,” “Hidden Persuasion or Junk Science?”, and “Is the Ad a Success? The Brain Waves Tell All” were common. Neuromarketing spokespeople were happy to provide provocative and unsubstantiated sound bites to eager reporters. Public advocacy groups were up in arms over this apparent new threat to consumer autonomy.

A small number of corporate buyers with discretionary budgets were willing to give the new technology a try. These early adopters were the sorts of leaders in any field who will try new things in the hopes of finding a fresh source of competitive advantage, but who fully realize that most such experiments fail. These buyers stand in sharp contrast to mainstream buyers who tend to avoid new technologies until they’re proven and adopted by most of their peers.

Early adopters are not surprised to hear wild and exaggerated claims. They expect them, because they know that many new vendors are competing for their attention and will say just about anything to get noticed. So, they discount the claims but buy anyway because they’re willing to experiment and they want to understand the new technology. But wild and exaggerated claims don’t work with mainstream buyers, who control most of the budget in any industry. These buyers don’t want to experiment; they want to adopt proven solutions that work with their existing processes and practices. In other words, they want solutions that are standardized and predictable.

Embracing new standards for neuromarketing

A standard is an agreed-upon blueprint or design that allows products from different vendors to be interchangeable in some way. For example, because there are light-fixture standards, you can be confident that whatever company sells you a light bulb, the bulb will fit into your lamp’s socket. This doesn’t mean that all light bulbs are the same. They still compete with each other, but on attributes other than “socket fitting,” like price, longevity, or energy efficiency.

A standard can also be a performance standard, like the fuel-efficiency standard that says new cars in the United States must achieve an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.

A prerequisite for industry standards is a sponsoring industry standards body. In the electronics industry, a company called UL tests electronic equipment, so light bulbs are designated as “UL certified” when they meet standards.

Most industries have established industry associations, which, as part of their representation of the industry as a whole, develop codes of ethics and standards for members to follow. For example, the opinion survey industry has the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the market research industry has the Marketing Research Association, and the advertising industry has the Advertising Research Foundation. In 2012, the first trade association devoted exclusively to neuromarketing was founded, the Neuromarketing Science & Business Association.

The first major standards effort directed at neuromarketing was launched by the ARF in 2010. Eight neuromarketing vendors using very different technologies — fMRI, EEG, biometrics, facial expression coding, and electromyography (EMG) — each analyzed TV ads provided by 12 sponsoring companies. The results were shared with a panel of science and marketing experts who looked for consistencies where standards could be identified or applied across methodologies.

The experts identified several areas where they thought standards could be developed: first, with regard to the suitability of different methods for measuring different advertising responses, and second, with regard to clarity of communication regarding various design and delivery aspects of any neuromarketing study, using any methodology. Recommended standards for measuring different advertising response variables included the following:

Comprehension, understanding of messages: Traditional methods assess conscious comprehension well. Neuroscience measures can complement these traditional methods by identifying problem spots in a story or message.

Purchase intent: Traditional measures can be sufficient if properly framed and validated. fMRI may provide complementary measures of emotional response

Focus of visual attention: Eye tracking appears to be the best measure.

Memory: Traditional methods are good at measuring conscious recall. Some neuroscience methods can assess implicit and long-term memory and provide details, such as moments that were not processed explicitly.

Arousal, strength of emotional response: Biometric and neurological methods generally have an advantage over traditional methods.

Direction of emotion (liking or disliking): Neurological methods and facial coding can be more accurate than traditional methods, especially for assessing “branding moments,” but limitations of some methods were noted.

Engagement, personal relevance, emotional engagement: Concepts need to be more clearly defined. Appropriately defined, neuroscience methods would likely have an advantage over traditional methods.

Social desirability: Neuroscience methods generally avoid cognitive biases like social desirability that are difficult for traditional methods.

With regard to design and delivery of research, the experts agreed that neuromarketing studies would benefit from more standardization in several areas:

Explaining sample size, sample composition, and recruitment criteria

Showing how the experimental design supports research objectives

Documenting data collection, analysis, and interpretation procedures

Specifying validity and reliability of metrics used in the study

Identifying statistical tests and significance levels for all comparisons

Clearly separating findings from interpretations in reports of results

These neuromarketing standards provide an excellent start. We have contributed some ideas on a similar set of design and delivery standards in Chapters 19 and 20. Because the ARF recommendations apply specifically to advertising testing, similar standards efforts may be taken up in other application areas, such as branding, product design, packaging, shopping, online, and entertainment. These efforts can be spearheaded by associations within each of these application areas, or pursued under a dedicated neuromarketing association, like the NMSBA.

Standards are important for industry growth and acceptance because they codify what buyers expect. To the extent vendors show a willingness to comply with standards, commerce can be conducted more efficiently and with more confidence by both buyers and sellers. Vendors who resist standards by claiming they conflict with proprietary methodologies are missing the point. Standards don’t replace competitive differentiation; they just make it easier for buyers to buy. For this reason, vendors ignore standards at their own peril.

One topic the neuromarketing industry hasn’t addressed yet (as of mid-2013) is vendor accreditation (the process of certifying an organization as qualified to practice in a field). Mature industry associations often tie membership in the association to meeting accreditation criteria. Accreditation strengthens the image of an industry by screening out unqualified entrants and providing an indicator of quality that allows buyers to engage the industry with greater confidence and predictability. Neuromarketing may not be quite ready for accreditation at this time, but as standards become more established, this may be a function that the NMSBA should consider adopting.

Understanding Legal Issues Concerning Neuromarketing

In keeping with its “Wild West” early years, neuromarketing has had some brushes with the law. As journalists and other commentators began reporting on or speculating about the potential ability of neuromarketing techniques to press “buy buttons” in the brain, some observers began to ask about the legal implications: If neuromarketing constitutes a threat to the autonomy of consumers, should it be regulated or even banned outright?

Should neuromarketing be banned?

This may seem like an extreme question, until you consider that in France, neuromarketing has, in fact, been banned. In 2011, the French Parliament outlawed all uses of neuroimaging for purposes other than medical or scientific research or expert testimony in court cases. The net effect was to make neuromarketing illegal in France.

Looking at some of the commentary around this decision, it seems clear that French lawmakers were not so much concerned about the possibility of neuromarketing being used to erode consumer autonomy as they were convinced that neuromarketers were unscrupulous opportunists who were lying about the capabilities of their products and services.

In our opinion, this sort of legislative activism is both premature and inappropriate. It’s premature because it constitutes a rush to judgment well before all the relevant evidence is in. If every new technology were banned because of the imprudent statements of its early advocates, most technology innovation would be stopped in its tracks. Early adopters are well aware of the tendency toward exaggeration in new fields. They invest in new technologies despite these claims, not because of them, and they certainly don’t need government legislators second-guessing how technologies will evolve over time.

But more important, this kind of regulatory reaction is inappropriate, because it replaces marketplace decision making with legislative decision making. Buyers determine what’s believable based on performance, not hype. If neuromarketers make claims that are unsustainable, it won’t take long for the marketplace to figure this out and move its research spending elsewhere. Case in point: Many of the companies and individuals who were most associated with “neuro-hype” in the early days of neuromarketing are no longer active in the field.

Balancing accountability and free speech in the marketplace

The more interesting question that neuromarketing has raised in legal circles is whether messages and cues we receive through nonconscious means constitute “speech” that should be protected under free speech laws (in the United States, these fall under the jurisdiction of the First Amendment), or whether they should be subjected to separate and more restrictive regulation. The underlying idea is that nonconscious influences on consumers (such as priming) constitute a special case of coercion that erodes the decision-making autonomy of individuals by subjecting them to influences on their choices and actions that they aren’t aware of and, therefore, can’t control.

We examine this idea throughout the book, from many angles, and we provide lots of evidence supporting the first assertion: Nonconscious influences do exist, and they do influence consumers in ways that consumers aren’t aware of. But what’s added in this legal version of the question is the idea that rational consideration is the norm for consumer decision making, and nonconscious influence is the exception. But modern brain science tells us just the opposite: Nonconscious influence is the norm and rational consideration is the exception.

Given that responding nonconsciously to nonconscious influences is pretty much what our brains spend most of the time doing, calling this “coercion” seems problematic. How do we separate coercive from noncoercive influences? We use nonconscious cues in our enjoyment of art, our judgments of people, and our choices of soft drinks. Sometimes nonconscious influences help us make better decisions; other times they lead us astray. Sometimes nonconscious processes even help us resist nonconscious influences, in the form of persuasion correction goals (see Chapter 8). Contrary to the idea of coercion, our nonconscious minds aren’t at war with our conscious minds, constantly trying to undermine them with bad ideas and irresistible temptations. The two systems in our brains work together and generally do a good job of keeping us safe and satisfied.

The inescapable fact is that we absorb messages and other cues from our environment through both conscious and nonconscious channels. This certainly creates some interesting challenges for defining the concept of “speech” in a legal sense, but it doesn’t give governments the license to start classifying some messages and cues as coercive and others as not.

Human beings are as accountable today for their actions as they were before the nonconscious mind was discovered. The doctrine of free speech supports that accountability, allowing people to roam freely in the marketplace and make their choices on the basis of whatever influences them at the moment. Brain science tells us that we’re all taking in nonconscious influences all the time, and we use these influences in ways we aren’t aware of. But we all experience the consequences of our choices, and from those consequences we learn and can change our later choices and actions. That is how consumers exercise their autonomy, and how products rise and fall in the marketplace, whatever messages and cues those products may be covertly sending us.

Using Neuromarketing to Make Us Healthier and Wiser

Now that we’ve made the case that neuromarketing isn’t a source of evil that needs to be banned or regulated, let’s consider the opposite question: Can neuromarketing be a source of good in society? This question moves us into the realm of public policy, where we see at least three areas that can benefit from the insights and techniques of neuromarketing: public service advertising, public policy design, and education.

Neuromarketing and public service advertising

With many companies making investments in neuromarketing to improve traditional advertising, it seems a natural extension for neuromarketing to be applied to improving public service advertising (PSA). What PSA can learn from neuromarketing is that people’s responses to advertising use the same brain circuitry, whether they’re being asked to act smarter or to buy a new brand of toothpaste. The same metrics apply, but the definition of what constitutes a “good” score may vary.

As we discuss in Chapter 11, one form of PSA — the direct response appeal for an immediate action, like making a contribution to a charitable organization — can be evaluated in terms of the direct route to advertising effectiveness. It needs to attract attention, generate interest, deliver a compelling persuasive message, and prompt an immediate action.

Emotional response is extremely important to such ads, and indirect neuromarketing measures of emotion can help overcome the strong social-desirability bias that often distorts self-reports about altruistic causes and behaviors.

For PSAs that are meant to change longer-term behavior — such as promoting smoking cessation, immunization, medical checkups, and so on — emotions are perhaps even more important. And here we see some interesting differences from commercial advertising. Unlike traditional ads, which usually evoke only the positive end of the emotional spectrum, PSAs tend to use a much wider emotional palette in communicating to viewers. Neuromarketing can make useful contributions, both theoretically and practically, by helping PSA advertisers better understand how these emotions impact effectiveness.

Some initial neuromarketing work in this area has been intriguing. British research company BrainJuicer, for example, explored the use of negative emotions in PSAs, and found that negative emotions have different effects according to how they’re directed. Sadness, according to the study, can spur action if the ad encourages viewers to feel the sadness of others, but not if it simply makes viewers feel sad themselves. Similarly, evoking negative emotions — disgust, anger, even fear — with an assertive message about how to overcome those emotions, can be a powerful motivator of action or behavior change.

We see in published research like the Falk studies of smoking cessation (mentioned earlier in this chapter) that PSAs do work, and that they appear to work in ways that may not be fully accessible to the conscious mind. This creates a natural opportunity for neuromarketers to make a contribution to PSA effectiveness research, possibly in partnership with a sponsoring trade association. The results would be beneficial to PSA advertisers and would provide a little polish to the reputation of neuromarketing as well.

Neuromarketing and public policy design and implementation

The idea that neuromarketing principles and techniques can be relevant to public policy was first popularized by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their 2008 bestseller, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Penguin). Thaler and Sunstein took the behavioral economics notion of choice architecture (structuring a choice situation to favor one choice over another) into the world of public policy, showing how vastly different policy outcomes can be achieved by making small changes in context or how choices are presented.

The classic example of a nudge is the case of organ donations. In countries where people have to check a box on an application form to become organ donors, only about 5 percent do so. But in countries where people have to check a box not to become a donor, more than 80 percent become donors. This “nudge” makes use of the default bias heuristic (decision-making shortcut), introduced in Chapter 8. Our cognitive-miser brains would rather accept a default, whatever it is, than expend the effort to make an explicit decision.

Other examples of successful policy nudges include creating defaults for enrollment in 401(k) retirement plans and encouraging energy conservations by showing people how much energy their neighbors are saving. The logic of these public policy nudges is strikingly similar to the logic of the shopper marketing strategies discussed in Chapter 12. The same principles apply.

To our knowledge, no neuromarketing firm has yet reported getting involved in designing or testing public policy choice architectures, but this is an area that can clearly benefit from the skills and expertise of neuromarketers, while simultaneously producing meaningful contributions to the public good.

Neuromarketing and education

Can neuromarketing be used to improve education? We think so. Many brain science findings relevant to neuromarketing are also relevant to education, sometimes in a reverse manner. For example, in Chapter 5 we explain that processing fluency discourages conscious scrutiny. Processing disfluency also produces greater scrutiny, more attention to detail, and better memory retention. So, here we have an easy lesson for education: Use more hard-to-read fonts in teaching materials!

In some cases, what works for marketing materials may be exactly what doesn’t work for teaching materials. In other cases, maybe educators have something to learn from marketers and neuromarketers. How might low-attention processing principles be applied to education? Is it possible to make better use of the vast capacity of implicit memory and learning in educational contexts? Such questions can provide a foundation for collaboration between educators and neuromarketers.

Some educational materials can be beneficially tested using neuromarketing techniques. The same measures that test ads for effectiveness can be used to test teaching materials for effectiveness. Why should presentations, demonstrations, and study material we use in our classrooms be any less engaging and enticing than the ads we show on TV?

A final thought is that perhaps neuromarketing itself, or at least the key brain science concepts on which it is built (see Chapter 24), should be taught in our schools. Throughout this book, we note that the consumer’s best defense against System 1 thinking and nonconscious influences is to have a basic understanding of the brain dynamics involved, and how they operate outside our conscious awareness. We know from countless studies that when people are made aware of the nonconscious primes and cues impacting their behavior, the impact disappears. We believe it’s never too soon for kids to start being educated about how their brains work, how marketing works, how they make decisions, and how they can equip themselves to be better and smarter consumers.