There’s two ways of looking is a neuromarketing unethical?
- On the one side, we can think that neuromarketing makes marketers too effective. They have too much influence on the unconscious side of consumer choice, and they can trick people into being more or less consumer zombies.
- The other thing is that neuromarketing can also be questions on whether it’s conducted correctly. And there’s a question about validity and reliability of the methods.
For example, in a study by Murphy, Illes, and Reiner, they looked at two different aspects of neuroethics on neuromarketing. First of all, they looked at the protection of various parties, who may be harmed or exploited by research, marketing, and deployment of neuromarketing. And they looked at the protection of consumer autonomy if neuromarketing reaches a critical level of effectiveness, which is also called stealth neuromarketing. What the researcher suggests is that neuromarketing companies and academics could use these techniques which would also adopt a code of ethics in how they employ these techniques.
Another concern can be raised by Wilson, Gaines & Hill, they are concerned by consumer awareness. This means that basically how much are consumers and test people aware of being influenced by these techniques.
A third concern relates to how neuroscience is used and interpreted by other people. For example, bad experimental design. A little research is not good enough. And this is a concern, one we want to extrapolate from the results of that study.
Another concern is that many methods are not validated enough. This means that some methods are simply not good enough to extract and extrapolate from the results that we get.
A third problem is that with the neuroscience data we have, you might still do a poor work at analyzing and preprocessing the data.
And finally, there might be a misrepresentation and overselling of the results from a neuroscience study. One example is what we call reverse inference. And let me read up a quote from the famous book, Byology in which Martin Lindstrom conducted a study on smokers responses to looking at warning signs on cigarette packages. The warning labels backfired. The stimulated in nucleus accumbens sometimes called the craving spot which lights up in their fMRI. Whenever a person craves something, whether it’s alcohol, drugs, tobacco, or gambling. So it seems logical. It seems that prior research has conducted studies on drugs, for example, how people respond to drugs. And found that the nuclear circumbance, one particular structure of the brain, is more engaged when people are craving something. What Lindstrom then did, was to find the craving spot, this particular part of the brain, when people were looking at cigarette packages. And just by using the prior research, he could say, many people are smokers are craving cigarettes when they’re looking at warning signs. The problem with this, it’s a logical fallacy.
Let me give you an example. In a study by colleagues they found that this particular part of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, yes. It is activated when people are looking for something positive but also, and even sometimes stronger, when people are looking for and expecting something negative. So this means that you can’t just look at that particular part of the brain and expect that they are only expecting something positive. So based on this very brief discussion, can we say that neuromarketing and consumer neuroscience is bad?
Let’s take a summary – Is it unethical?
First of all, whether any science is good or bad does not really depend on the science, but how it’s employed. So neuromarketing can be used for bad purposes, but it could equally be used for good purposes. It can be used for improving the lives of people.
A second concern is that the commercial neuromarketing possibly needs some level of control. What we see today is that there are associations being established exactly for that purpose.
And finally, what we can say is that insights from neuromarketing and consumer neuroscience can improve consumer’s lives. It can help us detect errors. It can help us improve the detection and treatment of things such as compulsive buying disorder and pathological gambling.
