Originally Published April 2013

Our customers lie. Maybe not on purpose. And maybe not to be harmful. But they lie. And if we want to manage these lies effectively we have to understand better how they are produced by the conflict between the cognitive brain and the emotional brain.

Deception in Consumer Research

When we as marketers ask consumers to respond to surveys or participate in focus groups we know there is a chance of getting less-than-truthful responses. This deception can be intentional and malevolent or it can occur without conscious control. And in the increasingly popular social media channels where there is more anonymity and less personal engagement, deception is even more likely.

Consumers can lie because they don’t like the product but don’t want to be rude. Or they may succumb to social pressures in a group setting and lie about their likes or dislikes of a product in order to gain acceptance to that group. And sometimes, due to an array of individual factors including memory transference, consumers may report false impressions of products that they genuinely believe to be true. For these and a variety of other reasons these deceptions show up in consumer insights testing.

This known possibility of deception in the feedback loop creates a bias that has traditionally been mitigated through large and costly sample sizes. But recent work in the fields of neuromarketing, psychology and physiology is suggesting that there are better methods for gathering consumer insights with more accurate data and with much smaller sample sizes.

Several years ago, in an effort to design a more effective method for measuring advertising impact, I launched an independent research program to study the physiological connection between emotions and consumer reactions. In the process I learned a great deal about how the physiology of our ancestors has shaped the way we make buying decisions today.

The Ancient History of Emotional Behavior

As humans, we have evolved over millions of years with all of the innate behaviors and complex reward systems necessary for our two most important personal goals: our survival and the survival of our offspring. That is, we are pre-wired to survive and make babies. Almost everything we do in life that genuinely makes us feel good is related in some way to one of these very important goals. And that feeling is tied directly to emotional responses.

Emotions are thought to have evolved as a way for our brains to manage our behavior toward those personal goals. Based in a primitive part of the brain called the limbic system, our emotions are integrated with the body through the endocrine system and the autonomic nervous system to provide a complex psychophysiological response process that makes us feel good or feel bad based on our success or failure at satisfying our personal goals. Involuntarily, we smile and feel exhilarated when things go well and we frown or cry when they go badly.

Our emotions also can influence key bodily functions—heart rate, respiration, perspiration, etc.—to prepare us for actions related to those goals (i.e., the fight or flight response). But our emotions can also manifest themselves through changes in other parts of the body, most notably through our facial expressions. The face is innervated by both the somatic and autonomic nervous systems which puts it under the influence of both conscious and unconscious control. So, the face can respond to subconscious emotional stimuli much like other physiological functions.

The Cognitive Brain (Almost) Takes Over

This system of emotions and physiology helped manage human behavior for millions of years. Then, around 10,000 years ago when humans began settling into larger clans, villages and cities, the behaviors that satisfied our personal needs quickly came into conflict with the needs of the other humans in those larger communities. Too many people in one place, each satisfying his or her own personal needs, will certainly lead to discord. In order for us to live together in these large groups, we needed to learn to “play nice in the sandbox.” We needed behaviors that satisfied our personal goals, but stopped short of interfering with the ability of others to enjoy the same.

To live harmoniously in large groups, humans had to develop the concept of reciprocal altruism which is basically the you be nice to me and I’ll be nice to you philosophy. It has been theorized that laws and religions were cultivated in an effort to provide the internal (religious) and external (legal) behavioral modifications necessary for people to act in a more civil manner. As this behavior modification was a conscious effort, it came under control of the cognitive part of the brain.

However, as we developed this outer layer of cognitive civility our emotions stayed tuned to our inner layer of personal goal satisfaction, still dominated by the limbic system. And it is this emotional part of the brain, being well integrated with our physiology, that has the ability to exert greater power over our behavior by manipulating the way we physically feel. In short, emotional motivators are far more powerful than cognitive ones.

Listening to the Emotional Brain

What does this mean to researchers interested in eliciting accurate data from consumers? It means we should pay more attention to the consumer’s physical response to our messaging. A consumer may be feeling a positive emotional response to a product but, due to a variety of reasons originating from cognitive processes, the response is withheld from surveys or focus group participation. This is a bias that could lead to false negatives in consumer insights research.

But a consumer experiencing a positive response likely would be unable to withhold the changes in physiology—heart rate, respiration, skin conductivity, subtle facial expressions, etc.—that are indicative of emotional responses. Likewise, false positive responses could also be detected in the same manner. And this is the finding most valuable to consumer insights researchers: a situation where a subject professes a cognitively-driven positive response but lacks the behavioral influence of a positive emotional response.

By measuring physiological responses (including facial expressions) we should be able to offer a much better analysis of consumer experience testing than was previously available through traditional focus groups, surveys or audience testing methods. And by reducing the bias associated with deception, we will do so with smaller sample sizes and reduced long term costs.

For further reading:

Understanding Emotions, by Keith Oatley, Dacher Keltner and Jennifer M. Jenkins (2006). Blackwell Publishing. Maiden, MA USA.