6.4 Is Neuromarketing Unethical?

Is neuromarketing unethical? There's two ways of looking at that. On the one

side we can think that neuromarketing makes marketers too effective. They
have too much influence on the unconscious side of the consumer choice and
they can trick people into being more or less consumer zombies. The other
thing is that neuromarketing can also be questions on whether it's conducted
correctly. And there's a question about validity and reliability of the methods.
For example, in a study by Murphy, Illers, and Reiner, they looked at two
different aspects of neuroethics on neuromarketing. First of all, they looked at
the protection of various parties, who may be harmed or exploited by research,
marketing, and deployment of neuromarketing. And they looked the protection
of consumer autonomy if neuromarketing reaches a critical level of
effectiveness, which is also called stealth neuromarketing. What the
researchers suggests is a new marketing companies and academics could use
these techniques, but should also adopt a code of ethics in how they employ
these techniques. Another concerns could be raised by Wilson, Gaines and Hill
They are concerned by consumer awareness. This means that basically how
much are consumers and test people aware of being influenced by these
techniques. A third concern relates to how neuroscience is used and
interpreted by other people. For example, bad experimental design. A lot of
research is not good enough, and this is a concern when we want to
extraculate from the results of that study. Another concern is that many
methods are not validated enough. This means that some methods are simply
not good enough to extract and extrapolate from the results that we get. A third
problem is that with the neuroscience data we have, you might still do a poor
work at analyzing and pre-processing the data. And finally, there might be a
misrepresentation, an overselling of the results from a neuroscience study.
One example is what we call reverse inference. And let me read up a quote
from the famous book Biology in which Martin Lindstrom conducted a study on
smokers' responses to looking at warning signs on cigarette packages. The
warning labels backfired. This stimulated a nucleus encumbrance sometimes
called the craving spot, which lights up on fMRI whenever a person creates
something, whether it's alcohol, drugs, tobacco, or gambling. So it seems
logical. It seems that prior research has conducted studies on drugs, for
example, how people respond to drugs, and found the nucleus accumbens in
one particular structure in the brain is more engaged when people are craving
something. What Lindstrom then did was to find the craving spot, this
particular part of the brain, when people were looking at secret packages. And
just by using the prior research he could say maybe people are smokes are
craving cigarettes when they're looking at warning signs. The problem with
this, it's a logical fallacy. Let me give you an example, in a study by Levitt and
colleagues, they found that this particular part of the brain, the nucleus
accumbens, yes. It is activated when people are looking for something
positive, but also, and even sometimes stronger, when people are looking for
and expecting something negative. So this means that you can't just look at
that particular part of the brain and expect that they are only expecting
something positive. So based on this very brief discussion, can we say that
neuromarketing and consumer science is bad? Let's take a summary. First of
all, whether any science is good or bad does not really depend on the science,
but how it's employed. So neuromarketing can be used for bad purposes, but it
could equally be used for good purposes. It can be used for improving the lives
of people. A second concern is that the commercial neuromarketing possibly
needs some level of control. What we see today is that there are associations
being established exactly for that purpose. And finally, what we can say is that
insights from neuromarketing and consumer neuroscience can improve
consumer's lives. It can help us detect errors. It can help us improve the
detection and treatment of things such as compulsive buying disorder and
pathological gambling. And this concludes the sixth and final session of the
Introduction to Neuromarketing and Consumer Neuroscience. I hope you have
enjoyed this series of lectures. Goodbye for now.