With the emergence of neuroeconomics and neuromarketing, there is no place to hide your preferences inside your brain. The main objective of these emerging fields is to understand your reactions toward different stimuli, to discover what triggers your consumption impulses and to decipher what you really want.
Although it sounds like a science fiction movie, Dr. David Lewis from the research consultancy Mindlab International has dedicated thirty years of his life to study psychological and physiological reaction in humans. No wonder why he is considered the ‘father of neuromarketing’.
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| Source: IntraMed.net |
Our preferences are determined by a great mixture of factors, including personality, cultural background, religion, gender, education and even age. Neuromarketing tests are a tool to pass over your mental recipe and analyze your reactions. The results are stunning, even in those cases where we can’t conscientiously perceive the different between two similar stimuli.
However, who is controlling these studies? And who is in charge of defining the limits of neuromarketing? Everything sounds pretty amazing but without clear boundaries we could fall into the deep hole of ethics: is it right to peek inside people’s mind to sell them the right pair of shoes? For some, the issue will get really disturbing and can jeopardize our legal right to privacy.
For now, I prefer to spend hours in a store until I make up my mind whether I should buy the blue product than being mentally scanned for the right choice. I already accepted that most of the time I’ll be back to return the articles I didn’t like.
