Kellogg Immersion Trip Shows Faculty Members How to Read Minds

The following article was originally sourced from “How to read a mind,” a news piece that appeared on Kellogg’s News & Events page. 

20 Kellogg School of Management faculty members went on a field trip organized by Assistant Professor of Marketing Moran Cerf to talk about the human brain. While visiting Nielsen Holdings, a global information and measurement company, the faculty members discussed a new field of research known as neuromarketing, or “consumer neuroscience.” Neuromarketing bypasses self-reported information by analyzing activity within the brain itself, trying to tap into the underlying choices and decisions a person makes, without the biases our conscious minds pose.

“Instead of using psychology — as we’ve done for the past 20 years — to try and understand what people do and want or are interested in, we try to look at the brain to understand those desires,” Cerf said.

In recent years, around 120 companies including Nielsen, have begun offering services that used physical measurements to figure out what research subjects are thinking. Potential customers, they found, tended to balk at the cost of these services, often pointing to a perceived lack of scientific data to back up neuromarketing’s validity.

Cerf hopes further research will produce the data that will convince the skeptics.

“We push for studies that will give answers about what can and cannot be done,” said says. “Nielsen is interested in having relationships with academics.”

Nielsen representatives and Cerf agree that the data is compelling enough to call for further study.

“Even if it’s not obvious how we would use this new tool, it is something we can put in our toolbox,” Mitchell Petersen, the Glen Vasel Professor of Finance and the director of the Helzer Center for Private Equity and Venture Capital at Kellogg, said. “You never know where research will take you.”

regions: Washington, DC

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