The rise of Neuromarketing: a better understanding of consumer’s behavior?

Many discoveries and developments in Neuroscience have also been very relevant in the exploit of the new field of Neuroeconomics: it represents a field of neuroscience that studies those processes that connect sensation and action by revealing the neurobiological mechanisms by which decisions are made. Neuroeconomists, by identifying which region of the brain are active in which types of decision processes, hope to better understand the nature of all those decisions that look to be suboptimal and illogical.

All those patients, who had normal social behavior until the onset of some brain disfunction (and who did not suffer from any kind of difficult decision making in sound decisions before the lesion) were now taking decisions against their own interests and against those of their closest friends and relatives. This was happening in spite of their intellectual instruments being essentially preserved. Patients had no traces of relevant impairments of logical reasoning, no problems in using oral speeching etc. However, their decisions were compromised, but they also knew where they were mistaking. Similar future decisions were taken in similar future situations.

Social neuroscience and Neuroeconomics were by then ready to exploit functional neuroimaging techniques to its full adavantage. Interesting for understanding the relevance of these two fields, are the following critical evidence that showed up between the mid-1980s and the mid1990s:
- Normal persons who sustained braind damage located on the ventral and medial sectors of the prefrontal cortex showed, after the onset of the lesion, relevant impefections in the decision making process (especially in social behavior).
- These imperfections were so much highlighted in two areas of social behavior, that practically no special diagnostic tools were required; the above mentioned areas were the one of interpersonal relationships and of decision making, in particular related with financial issues.
- The patients with lesions on the ventromedial prefrontal cortex had remarkably preserved intellect, as stated and measured by conventional neuropsychological instruments, and an equally remarkable shortage of emotional behavior (such as general reduced emotional resonance along with specific impairments in social emotions, like compassion and embarrassment).

For many neuroscientists, the greater promise of Neuroeconomics should be to supply theories and experimental designs for Neuroscience applications. Economists are much interested and curious about Neuroscience, but skeptical about the use and the contribution of informations that it provide to do better economics.

Nevertheless, at the same time it is hard to believe that some neuroscientific regularities could not help explaining some existing economic anomaly, especially those unresolved for decades. Indeed, in many economic areas thare are basic constructs or variables, which are at the basis of current debates, that can be usefully be identified as neural processes and can be studied using fMRI and other neuroscientific techniques; for example in finance there are literally millions of observations and assumptions of daily price movements and despite having large access to terrific data, after years and years of careful research there is no official or agreed theory of why stocks’ price fluctuates, why people decide to trade and why there are so many actively managed mutual funds despite poor fund performance.

Maybe the key to solve these dilemmas could be by knowing more about neural mechanisms that underlie conformity, wishful thinking, perceptions of expertise, attention paid to large price changes etc. In order to shape also sensible policy and governmental regulation, the first step could be the adoption of these revolutionary assumptions, for understading the brain mechanism that process reward and curb/produce compulsion and their evolutionary origins.

Neuroscientific studies of simple reward circuitry in rats and monkeys justify some of the easiest ideas of economics, in specific a “commom brain currency” which allows the substitution and the existence of neurons that encode expected reward. Applications do not flow only from neuroscience to economics, intellectual trades could also go in the opposite direction; for neuroscience we often adopt familiar economic language (such as division of labour, constraint, coordination, executive function…) but these concepts are not formalized in Neuroscience as they are in economics.
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