6.

1 Neuroethics and Consumer Aberration

Welcome back to the sixth and final lecture in The Introduction to Consumer
Neuroscience and Neuromarketing. This time we will talk about neuroeethics and
consumer aberrations. If you think about the that we as consumers make up our minds,
we are affected by several things and we deviate from rational choices. We are affected
by brands, we are affected by contexts, by price and we take our choices, often without
really deliberating on what kinds of choices we make. Now take an example, what if I
gave you $100 right now, or I gave you $120 in a month? Making these kinds of choices
is what we call inter-temporal choices. And if we look at how the brain responds when
you're choosing the immediate reward, the $100 right now, or the delayed reward, $120
in a month, we activate two different systems of the brain. You can see here we have
sketched that out. First of all, the immediate responses is what we call the beta system
response. This is where we find stronger activation of the basal ganglia, the deep
structures of the brain and the medial and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. As opposed
to this, when we are looking at, when people are choosing delayed rewards, the $120 in
a month, we can see what we call the delta system response. This includes the
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the priadal cortex and other cortical regions. And as you
can see they're two very distinct regions of the brain that make the immediate versus
the delayed reward. Our human brains are filled with errors and as you can see on this
link there's a long list of cognitive mistakes that we can make as human beings. Although
everyone is affected by brands, context and other people, we also differ in the amount of
how much we are affected by all this. We're all affected by brands, contexts, other
people. But some are more effective than others. In a study by Michael Deppe and
colleagues, they studied why some people are more affected than others. And they found
that a particular part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex drives the
individual susceptibility to be affected by brands. That means that the more activation
they found in this part of the brain, the more people were susceptible to the brands.
Unfortunately, some of us are more prone to making bad mistakes than others. We see
people today in the modern world suffering from Pathological gambling and Compulsive
Buying Disorder. And if you take a break from this lecture and look down to the link we
have below this lecture. We urge you to fill out the survey we have down there. That's
related to Compulsive Buying Disorder. Let us take a deeper look at Compulsive Buying
Disorder. What is it? Compulsive Buying Disorder, or CBD, is an obsession with shopping
and buying behavior that causes adverse financial, personal, and social consequences. is
found in four to eight percent of the United States population, and approximately 80%
percent of those affected are women. In a recent study here at the Copenhagen Business
School, we studied people suffering from compulsive buying disorder, compared them to
different levels of healthy, control consumers. What the consumers were doing was to
look at a product then provide them with a price of how much they'd be willing to pay
for that product. What we saw was that compulsive buying disorders, especially those
with a fashion interest, were much more willing to pay a lot of money for the fashion
items. There was no difference between the compulsive buying disorder participants
and the healthy participants for fast-moving consumer goods. Will also gave all
participants different tasks. One of those tasks was a stroop task, which is a test of their
impulse control,. And when we compare the compulsive buying disorders to the healthy
controls there was no difference. This means that compulsive buying disorder is not an
impulse control disorder. What we did find was that compulsive buying disorder was
related to a much stronger arousal response when they were looking at the fashion
items. But not so much when they were looking at fast moving consumer goods. In the
final result was that, when we looked at the arousal response of people, healthy people
used the irrational response to make up their minds how much they're willing to pay for
a product. But when we looked at compulsive buying disorder, however much the
arousal response they had, didn't inform their willingness to pay for a product. It's as if
compulsive buying disorder, is related to a disconnection between arousal, their
emotional response and their choices.