Brain
scans of a small group of people can predict the actions of entire populations,
according to a new study by researchers from the University of Michigan, the
University of Oregon and the University of California at Los Angeles.
The findings are relevant to political advertising,
commercial market research and public health campaigns, and broaden the use of
brain imaging from a diagnostic to a predictive tool.
As opposed to the wisdom of the crowd, the study suggests that
the neurological reactions of a few—reactions that people are not even
consciously aware of and that differ from the opinions they express—can predict
the responses of many other people to ad campaigns promoting specific
behaviors.
"Brain responses to ads forecasted the ads'
success when other predictors failed," said Emily Falk, director of the
U-M Communication Neuroscience Lab and lead author of the study, which appears
online in Psychological Science.
"Our findings could help design better health
campaigns. This is a key step in reducing the number of smokers and reducing
deaths from cancer, heart disease and other smoking-related illnesses."
The findings, she said, might also help produce more
effective political campaign ads and provide a neural roadmap to why some
videos, fashions, behaviors and ideas go viral, moving from one person to many
thousands of others via social media.
Falk conducted the study with Elliot Berkman of
Oregon and Matthew Lieberman of UCLA. The researchers were supported by the
National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
For the study, the researchers recruited 31 heavy
smokers with a strong desire to quit, and examined their neural responses to
three anti-smoking ad campaigns, using functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI). All of the ads directly urged viewers to call the National Cancer
Institute's tobacco quit-line (1-800-QUIT-NOW).
Following the fMRI, participants rated the
effectiveness of the ads they had just viewed in a variety of ways. The
researchers compared their brain scans to their reports on the ads'
effectiveness.
To obtain population-level measures, the researchers
compared the number of calls to the tobacco quit-line in the month before and
after each media campaign first aired in three different media markets.
When asked what they thought of the ads,
participants rated Campaign B the highest, followed by Campaign A and then Campaign
C. Industry experts familiar with the campaigns also disliked Campaign C. The
three campaigns used very different strategies. Raters found Campaign C
annoying and guessed that it would be ineffective. By contrast, Campaigns A and
B resonated with participants, but in the end were less effective in actually
driving calls to 1-800-QUIT-NOW.
But brain scans, which focused on the medial
pre-frontal cortex, an area of the brain identified in earlier studies as
linked to positive responses to persuasive messages, showed a completely
different order, with Campaign C eliciting the strongest response.
At the population level,
each ad campaign led to increases in call volume to the quit-smoking line, compared
with a no-media control month before the launch of each campaign. The increases
ranged from 2.8 times to 32 times higher than the control month, and the
researchers found that Campaign C led to the highest increases, followed by
Campaign B and lastly Campaign A—just the opposite of the participants' guesses
but precisely the same as their brain scans showed.
"It seems that the brain is picking up on
important features of these ads, but we're not sure what these features are
yet," said Falk, assistant professor of communication studies and a
faculty associate at the U-M Institute for Social Research. "We're doing
follow up studies now to translate what the brain is telling us about how to
design better messages."
This study broadens the use of neuroscience data
from predicting individual behavior to predicting the responses of much larger
groups of people.
"It seems that the brain can predict the
responses of entire populations to ad campaigns," Falk said. "The
behavior of people whose brains are never examined may be inferred from the
brains of a small 'neural focus group.'
"These findings could help us improve the
success of campaigns. In the long run, we hope this will help us fight cancer
and other preventable diseases."
More
information: Falk's Communications Neuroscience Lab: http://cn.isr.umic …
u/index.html
Berkman's Social and Affective Neuroscience Lab: http://sanlab.uore
… SAN_Lab.html
Lieberman's Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab: http://www.scn.ucla.edu
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