NEUROSCEPTIC

The day after the General Election and the overall winner was the exit polls, which predicted the outcome with uncanny accuracy. Evidence of the enduring value of asking the right people the right question.

But if you’d gone to the annual research industry’s conference, Research2010, you’d have thought that asking people things was an outdated and frankly useless idea.

 As MRS Conferences go, Research2010 was Really Rather Good.  Hats off to co-chairs Simon Lidington and Nick Coates, not least for mentioning Roland Barthes in their introduction (that must have been a bet).

Trending strongly were co-creation, ethnography, online communities … and ‘brain stuff’.  The first three of these approaches build on what people say and are essentially generative or productive approaches.  All good stuff.  You try to learn from people-as-people, holistically.  There are no easy answers, interpretation is everything. 

But using fMRI scanners to show parts of people’s brains light up as they perform various tasks, is trying to replace what people say and is entirely reductive.  It treats people not as people, nor even as consumers, but just as lumps of grey matter. 

Presumably, brain scan advocates would exit poll by wiring up voters’ heads, to overcome the ‘limitations’ of verbal research techniques. Ethnographers would watch people while they queued then went into the private booth to vote. And co-creationists would invite voters to take part in a workshop, do some collage work and write about their experiences on a blog.

Instead, MR rivals GfK NOP / Ipsos MORI talked to people. (17,607 of them, working collaboratively with each other and with the broadcasters). 

Brainwave measurement deserves special treatment, as it is so flawed an approach that it is staggering that it gets any credence at all. Mark Earls is monitoring the nuttier aspects of ‘neurononsense’ on his blog for example, here.

To be fair, ‘brain stuff’ also covers implicit association measurement and eye-tracking, as Graham Page’s paper Brains, Babies and Bathwater outlined.

Maybe brain scanning appeals as it seems to offer marketing clients certainty and control, which are highly prized and so rarely found these days. There was a clue in Bioshopping: Revolutionising Shopper Insight, by Ian Addie of Nunwood and Dr David Lewis-Hodgson, of Mindlab International, who stated that:

“the measurement of brain activity through qEEG offers a solution to the limitations of conventional, verbal based research techniques“

This claim was based on someone doing a supermarket shop with a contraption on their head with lots of wires sticking out of it.  They conceded that:

“As our sample was one individual, it is impossible to arrive at any statistically robust and general conclusions about the mental processes behind shopping behaviour”

Wiring up people’s heads to understand their thoughts is just a mistake. Wrong-headed even. For one thing, our brains and our minds are two different things. For another, real brain experts say that trying to find neurological ‘triggers’ for certain actions is just wrong. And even if we could, we’d be measuring the aftermath of the action.

And brain scanning is trying to ‘correct’ a problem which has been hugely exaggerated (by brainwave gadget salespeople, amongst others). Just because people may not tell the whole truth when talking to researchers (or at any other time), just because we are ‘unreliable narrators’ of our own lives (knowing which helps you to deal with it), does not mean that research should stop trying to talk to people.

And now that the Tories are in, maybe we should all be more neurosceptic now.

Comments

[David L]

Great post.
Measuring a brain activity might ‘show’ what emotion is being experienced; it might show that people respond more strongly to a particular part of an ad than another; but that is all it tells you.

E.g. If the brain flashes in the ‘joy’ part of the brain, they must be experiencing joy (that’s even if it is that clear to locate).

But that’s only as far as it goes. And so what anyway?

In Ben Page’s paper it says on eye-tracking: “the methods also say nothing about why a particular area catches the eye”
It seems rather an expensive and elaborate method to not to get insight.

Rather than wiring brains, face-to-face communication can be simpler and accurate to 'read'.
We can see ‘joy’ (for example) rather simply through body language (e.g a smile) or through faster paced speech.
I mean, humans are intuitive (or hard-wired) to understand how they are responding (you don’t need a brain scanner to tell you that!)
More primal emotions like joy or fear are very hard to hide. People respond through ‘immediate language’ which has not gone through any ‘filtering’ processes.

And a researcher can then ask why they feel that way.

And that’s where both false and true truths come in. And that’s why experience in interpretation is invaluable; where the rub lies, lies the truth (or something like that).

Neuroscience has a long way to go before it proves itself (well to me anyway).