… of a “buy button” in the brain, there may also be a “don’t buy” button.

… magic.

Women can make men spend money. To know this, one need only be a man (or, I suppose, a woman with said ability). But does this have a direct application to business? Neuromarketing blog argues that it does.

A recent study showed that both conspicuous spending and altruistic behavior can be boosted in men by priming them to think about mating (in this particular experiment, they were asked to describe their perfect date). This same concept seems obviously applicable to sales. If a purchaser is male, an even moderately attractive female is going to push a button in his brain making him want to display his tail feathers, so to speak.

Neuromarketing brings up the somewhat cliche example of hot female pharmaceutical sales reps pushing pills on mostly male doctors. The point, of course, isn’t that there aren’t exceptions to the rules — female doctors, male reps, unattractive female reps — but that our brains build certain biases into the system. Doctors can be as scrupulous as they want, and the reps can be doing nothing to “prime” their clients to think about sex, but the brain wants what the brain wants. And the brain wants to scream to the world: “I am virile! I can make babies! Behold!”

And it’s not just women who can make such appeals:

Female salespeople aren’t the only ones who try to appeal to male customers for a “power display.” I’ve periodically received calls from boiler-room security salesmen (universally male, in my experience) trying to pitch a stock or at least get an agreement that I’ll listen to future pitches. I’m usually courteous when I disengage a telemarketer, but the only way to get these guys off the line is to hang up. Any attempt to disengage will produce more questions. One approach I’ve had them use is a line like, “Are you telling me you can’t make a $5,000 investment?” Said dismissively, it’s clearly intended to question the authority, the financial wherewithal, and ultimately the masculinity of the client.

As is often the case with many of these neuro-based insights, these biases and the techniques they suggest are already ingrained in our culture — after all, they emanate from our brains.

We’re swimming in this stuff. It’s just now, however, that we’re becoming aware of the water.

John B. Judis, author of The Emerging Democratic Majority, has what might initially seem to be an intriguing article in the current issue of The New Republic. In it, he argues that something called “terror management theory” has a good deal to tell us about why George W. Bush won reelection in 2004. I say the article “initially seems” intriguing because it falls apart upon inspection. While I believe political psychology and neuropolitics are fruitful fields of endeavor — explaining, for instance, how different personality traits affect political orientation — this Judis article seems to me to be a case of a lot of fancy words and interesting experiments telling us next to nothing we didn’t already know.

The basic thesis Judis advances is that September 11 (and the Bush administration’s subsequent use and abuse of the memory of 9/11) led to Republican victories in 2002 and 2004 because “mere thought of one’s mortality can trigger a range of emotions–from disdain for other races, religions, and nations, to a preference for charismatic over pragmatic leaders, to a heightened attraction to traditional mores.” Racism, bigotry, nationalism, daddy-fixation, Bible-thumping… every liberal stereotype of conservatives is heightened by what a group of psychologists has dubbed “mortality salience.”

The effect certainly seems to exist. As recounted in the article, experiments have shown that subjects primed to contemplate their own mortality have shown a greater propensity to fear other races and religions, wish to impose harsher penalties for crimes, and seek a strong leader than subject who have not been so primed.

Nonetheless, what does any of this really tell us about Bush, 9/11, 2002, and 2004? According to Judis:

[The results of numerous experiments] strongly suggested that Bush’s popularity was sustained by mortality reminders. The psychologists concluded in a paper published after the election that the government terror warnings, the release of Osama bin Laden’s video on October 29, and the Bush campaign’s reiteration of the terrorist threat (Cheney on election eve: “If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again”) were integral to Bush’s victory over Kerry. “From a terror management perspective,” they wrote, “the United States’ electorate was exposed to a wide-ranging multidimensional mortality salience induction.”

OK… But what has any of this told us that any political commentator in November of 2004 couldn’t have told us without aid of time-consuming studies and analysis conducted over several decades?

Yes, terrorism makes people scared, and this makes them seek out a strong leader. But why was President Bush so effective in presenting himself as that strong leader? Why couldn’t John Kerry effectively portray himself as a strong leader? While there are plenty of answers to such questions (Bush spent time at his ranch in Crawford, Kerry went windsurfing), none are enhanced by the psychological angle — they’re just common sense.

The one potentially interesting aspect of the psychological angle is that perhaps the entire Republican basket of issues was suddenly more attractive to voters — anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage, anti-immigrant, etc. — after 9/11 because of mortality salience, but the Judis article does little to make such a case. Sure, Karl Rove tried to pump up the gay-marriage issue in a way never seen before in American politics. But A) the Massachusetts court decision started the ball rolling, and B) there’s no evidence the gay-marriage initiatives actually helped the GOP on balance. On immigration, Bush has long been at odds with his party’s base, favoring greater Hispanic immigration; he also refused to demonize Muslims after 9/11, even going out of his way to portray Islam as a “religion of peace,” much to the chagrin of his conservative supporters. Overall, I see little evidence that 9/11 shifted the culture in a conservative direction in a way that particularly benefited Bush.

The major problem with Judis’s article, however, would seem to be that it just doesn’t do much to account for 2006. Saying that the memory of 9/11 had faded and Katrina had tarnished Bush’s image as “protector” seems pretty thin. Once again, there’s not much here that goes beyond a conventional political analysis.

If the “9/11 led to cultural conservatism led to more votes for Bush” angle could be established more firmly, there’d be something here. As it stands, I don’t think the case is made.

Meanwhile, the end of the article gives away which candidate the author fears might repeat Bush’s political success coming into 2008:

Of course, there are still voters within the Republican electorate whose hearts beat to the rhythms of September 11 and who are still engaged in a passionate defense of their worldview. They continue to identify the war in Iraq with the war on terror; they worry about illegal aliens and terrorists crossing the border; some even judge the growing public opposition to Bush as further confirmation of his role as protector. These voters appear particularly attracted to Rudy Giuliani, whose entire campaign is based upon reminding voters of September 11. And, if Giuliani is the Republican nominee in 2008, the election may pivot on his ability to use reminders of September 11 to provoke the public into another massive bout of worldview defense.

Given the outcome of 2006, following the same-old Republican script probably wouldn’t be a good idea for any GOP candidate. Neuroscience or no.

Don’t miss the Wall Street Journal’s fantastic article “Is This Man Cheating on His Wife?“

Basic story:

• Real-life man marries real-life woman
• Real-life man’s mother dies, real-life man becomes depressed and takes up Second Life
• Real-life man creates avatar-life man, a younger, better-looking version of himself
• Avatar-life man meets avatar hottie
• Avatar-life man marries avatar hottie
• Real-life wife of real-life man gets very pissed
• Real-life wife of real-life man rats real-life man out for extremely depressing profile in Wall Street Journal

Did I miss any major parts? Well, you’d have to read the whole profile — which I encourage you to do — to find out.

To answer the headline question — in contravention of the Great Law of Headline Question Marks — it seems safe to say: yes. While we’re not talking about a physical affair (if real-life man is to be believed, he’s never even talked to avatar hottie’s real-life counterpart on the phone), it’s certainly an emotional one. And even if he doesn’t feel like he’s cheating, he’s checked out of his real-life marriage in favor of his Second Life one.

This sort of thing is only going to become more common. As online worlds become more realistic, more immersive, and more rewarding (financially and otherwise), people who feel constrained in their real lives are going to turn to cyberlife. I don’t think this is an unmitigated evil — in fact, it may be quite a positive thing (value in life is where people find it, who’s to judge). But, at the same time, it is important for society to get its head around just how “real” these worlds can become to people — just so folks can go in with their eyes open.

The Neuromarketing blog looks at the Wall Street Journal piece and picks out some important points:

• Many people prefer their online friends to their meatspace friends.
• Many people find the “emotional highlight” of their week online as opposed to off.
• People tend to empathize with their avatars to a rather stunning degree; they even react to invasions of their avatar’s personal space as if a wino were falling asleep on their arm on the subway home in real life.

In other words: “From a neurological standpoint, virtual reality IS reality.”

Which circle is brighter? The one on the left or the one on the right?

It turns out, they’re both the same shade of white. But the halo surrounding the one on the left causes most people to experience it as being much brighter. Students looking at this illusion in a lab setting complained of it burning their retinas.

(via Cognitive Daily)

If you live in New York City and take the subway, you may have noticed a series of cartoon ads for something called “Windorphins.” What are they? A Cartoon Network show (my guess)? A depression drug? A kite-flying club for orphans? Just plain scary (guest-blogger Jacob Gershman’s guess)?

Well, it turns out they are … a rather lame ad for eBay. (I suppose one has a rush of endorphins when one wins an eBay auction.)

The theory seems to be that mystery gets people’s attention. And, well, here I am talking about eBay — so, I suppose, mission accomplished. Still, this strikes me as similar to those “The Algorithm Killed Jeeves” ads. Didn’t care then. Don’t care now.

(via 3quarksdaily)

According to this article, from McClatchy’s Washington Bureau, the Transportation Security Agency is now employing Behavior Detection Officers at airports to monitor passengers’ body language, behavior, and facial expressions. They’re currently deployed at “more than a dozen” airports; the TSA reportedly wants to have 500 of these agents trained and working by the end of 2008, though the article doesn’t say how many airports that would entail covering.

This is how the officers operate:

At the heart of the new screening system is a theory that when people try to conceal their emotions, they reveal their feelings in flashes that [University of California at San Francisco Professor Paul] Ekman, a pioneer in the field, calls “micro-expressions.” Fear and disgust are the key ones, he said, because they’re associated with deception.

Behavior detection officers work in pairs. Typically, one officer sizes up passengers openly while the other seems to be performing a routine security duty. A passenger who arouses suspicion, whether by micro-expressions, social interaction or body language gets subtle but more serious scrutiny.

A behavior specialist may decide to move in to help the suspicious passenger recover belongings that have passed through the baggage X-ray. Or he may ask where the traveler’s going. If more alarms go off, officers will “refer” the person to law enforcement officials for further questioning.

So, the next time the guy hands you back your shoes and asks you where you’re headed to today, he’s probably not just making conversation… as if you didn’t assume that already.

This is all sort of a domestic-beer version of Israel’s airport security, which has the drawback of being much more intrusive but the plus of actually having a shot at working.

I’ve had the pleasure of going through Israeli airport security a few times. The first time, heading to Israel on an El Al flight, the security folks grilled me about where I was going and where I was staying and why I was going, etc. etc. etc. My business was a bit odd (going to an academic conference on the topic of whether Israel needed a written constitution, with an emphasis on analyzing the U.S. Constitution), so I had a lot of explaining to do. The fact that I was on assignment for the most pro-Zionist paper in America didn’t seem to help. They even tried to trip me up by asking me if I spoke Hebrew. I said no (because, well, I don’t). But later I was asked, seemingly at random by another agent and a family in line with me, if I could translate. I, of course, said no. But it wasn’t until much later that it occurred to me that El Al has plenty of translators and didn’t need my services. On another occasion, on my way back from Israel, I could barely move for having sunburned myself on the beach in Tel Aviv. I thought Ben-Gurion security might take me down for walking so funny, but I made it through relatively unscathed.

The point is, while micro-expressions are real, I highly doubt a TSA officer with 16 hours of training can pick them up (typically, you hear about researchers studying such expressions in a lab setting, on slowed down videotape). Less intrusiveness than the Israeli system + far less training than the Israelis = far, far less effective.

The government seems to get this. They want to replace this still-being-implemented system with a computerized system that would, according to the article, use “videocams and computers to measure and analyze heart rate, respiration, body temperature and verbal responses as well as facial micro-expressions.” Sounds a lot better to me than the human version.

While the Malcolm Gladwell, Blink, argument might say that humans can read these sorts of cues well (I’m halfway through the book right now), I’d guess the ability varies quite a bit person-to-person, and I don’t trust our TSA staffing policies to put the right people in the right places. I’d greatly prefer to have a computer looking out for me.

And plenty of folks, I’m sure, won’t be happy with either solution. It is creepy being watched constantly in an airport — believe me, I know, I fly a lot for work. At the same time, you’re boarding a human-guided missile responsible not just for the lives of the passengers in the air but civilians on the ground. Our society asks for certain trade-offs between safety and security, and I’m not sure that this is an unreasonable one.

(via Sciam Observations)

UPDATE (12:50 a.m.): I just stumbled upon the fact that Professor Ekman has these CDs available that supposedly allow one to improve his or her ability to interpret facial expressions. I must say I’m intrigued.

Don’t miss John Tierney’s column, raising the possibility that we’re all Sims in some future (or, I suppose, present) computer geek’s virtual world:

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.

Of course, this all would answer one longstanding question:

It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.

Having played a lot of Sim City as a kid, I’d argue that we know this theory isn’t true for one simple reason: There’d be a LOT more earthquakes and tornadoes. Still, the Tierney column is worth reading to the end, just for the college-dorm-room-BS-session recursiveness of it all.

They say that on the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog. An article noted by Deception Blog puts that in some perspective.

An article under the title, “Deception in cyberspace: A comparison of text-only vs. avatar-supported medium,” in the September 2007 issue of International Journal of Human-Computer Studies relays the results of an experiment in online deception. Student participants were randomly assigned to either tell the truth or lie to online conversation partners. They then conducted conversations in either text-only or avatar-supported chat rooms.

There were three key findings:

* Participants who had been assigned to lie were more likely than truth-tellers to choose avatars that looked different from themselves.

* In text-only chat, liars had higher (self-reported) anxiety levels than truth-tellers; but the same effect did not show up in the avatar-supported chat.

* Avatar or no avatar, participants were not able to pick up on cues to deception.

In other words, an online avatar can make it easier (and less stressful) to lie, but it doesn’t make you any more or less trustworthy to those with whom you interact. You may be a dog, but to the world you have a poker face.

I mentioned yesterday that oenophiles are state whores — being told a wine was from California made them like it more than when they were told it was from North Dakota (nickname: “The Nothing State”).

Well, it turns out three-year-olds are brand whores. To the research mobile, Robin!:

A study, published in the Archives of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine yesterday, found that children as young as three preferred to eat foods they believed to be from McDonald’s - even if those foods, such as a serve of vegetables, were not part of the fast-food giant’s menu.

Researchers tested 63 preschoolers from low-income families in California. The children were each given two identical samples of three foods from McDonald’s, one in branded wrappers and the other in identical packaging bearing no brand. They were also given milk and carrots.

About 77 per cent of children said they preferred the taste of the french fries in the McDonald’s bag, while only 13.3 per cent favoured the fries in the plain bag. Only 10 per cent said they thought the two offerings tasted the same.

What we learn here that’s interesting is that “serve” is apparently Australian for “serving.” (The news story is from the Sydney Morning Herald.)

We also learn that our preferences are shaped far less by direct sensory input than we might imagine. Obviously, a chicken nugget should taste like a chicken nugget should taste like a chicken nugget. But it turns out, according to this study, that even carrot sticks taste better to kids if they’re in a McDonald’s bag than if they’re in a plain bag!

This (and the wine story) reminds me of one of my favorite segments from Penn & Teller’s “Bullshit,” where unsuspecting diners are told they’re eating a fancy meal, but really they’re being served stale bread and canned tomatoes. Needless to say, they — quite literally — eat it up.

These cognitive mistakes seem silly in children. But people of all ages are susceptible to them.

(via Neuromarketing)

What’s in a name?

Tell folks their wine comes from North Dakota and they have one experience.

Tell them it comes from California, and not only does the wine taste better to them — the food does, too.