In socio-cultural studies, one of the big pre-occupations in the last quarter of a century has been about mapping and measuring how people take decisions.
New disciplines have either been enhanced or emerged from this very quest. Neuromarketing has come to occupy almost a hallowed place in any serious marketing conclave. Behavioral Economics is no longer a fringe study, but rather something that is central to a substantial number of consumer discourses.
As somebody who’s job description will certainly include the phrase “culture watching” I am constantly confounded by how the positions taken by the Advertisers/Marketers/Neuroscientists and the Quant/Wall street types are diverged so as to occupy almost extreme ends of the spectrum.
While Marketing has come out of its obsession of accurately measuring people’s emotions. The dominant view point being that “sentiments” or “emotions” can never be accurately predicted leave alone measured. What one can measure are the physiological/cognitive surface markers of them. (Eye movements, head tilts, breathing rates etc)
Researches by Gerald Zaltman clearly posit that more often than not, the decisions that we become “aware” of consciously taking are actually being taken at least a couple of seconds ahead, deep in the brain.
Within Marketing research circles, the dominant wisdom is that one can never really “measure” how consumer feel and how are they going to act, as they themselves don’t know it entirely.
But the obsession to measure everything and this compelling desire to give a number to everything is probably what explains so much top dollar being spent in coming up with “better & robust” data sets, algorithms and softwares that track people movements and responses.
Here is something that I came across in the New York Times by Graham Bowley.
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