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Neuroscience and the law focus: what's the point of regulating advertising?
I have no doubt after reading the article entitled “The advertising effect – how do we get the balance of advertising right?” published today by Compass by Zoe Gannon and Neal Lawson that the major thesis of the authors that unregulated advertising is likely to be dangerous for society, and could have a massively detrimental effect.
I really liked this article, as I think that it is one of the few articles which seemed to have an understanding of the modern neuroscience involved in tackling a problem of huge cultural significance, maybe using legal measures. As someone who tends to read the introduction and conclusion of article, I found it most helpful that Gannon and Lawson summarized the gist of their argument successfully in the conclusion,
“If you go to an advertising company to sell a product or service their planners will strip the issue down to bare essentials before building a campaign around it. It is the essence of the message they are after, the essence of the advertising industry is that new technologies, new science and new psychology have put the industry increasingly out of social and political control. Advertising regulations now need to catch up with the reality of the advertising effect on us and our planet.”
On the other hand, I found Jackie Ashley’s response lacked any depth to an analysis of the problem from either a neuroscience or legal perspective (1). However, arguably, one of the most interesting enticing paragraphs begins with the sentence,
“Meanwhile neurologists are working out what images will trigger the buy button in our brains.”
Gannon and Lawson provide that “machines are being used to shed light on brain mechanisms that play a central role in consumer behaviour: circuits that underlie reward, decision making, motivation, emotions and the senses of self.” This would indeed seem to make sense, as the subjective experience of being the target of advertising probably has the same underlying neural basis as our euphoria on sex or drugs of abuse. Indeed, one of the many successes of neurological research in the last century has been to identy a neurobiological mechanism mediating behavior motivated by events commonly associated with pleasure in humans. These events are termed “rewards” and are viewed as primary factors governing normal behavior. The subjective impact of rewards (e.g., pleasure) can be considered essential (e.g., Young, 1959) or irrelevant (e.g., Skinner, 1953) to their effect on behaviour, but the motivational effect of rewards on behavior is now universally acknowledged by experimental psychologists.
In addition, the authors give due credit to one of the most important papers on the subject of “neuromarketing”, a relatively new field. A cognitive neuroscientist (Read Montague) postulated that, if people preferred the taste of Pepsi, the drink should have dominated the market. It didn’t. So in the summer of 2003, Montague gave himself a ‘Pepsi Challenge’ of a different sort: to figure out why people would buy a product they didn’t particularly like. Neuromarketing is effectively the study of the brain’s responses to ads, brands, and the rest of the messages littering the cultural landscape.
Montague had his subjects take the “Pepsi Challenge” while he watched their neural activity with a functional MRI machine, which tracks blood flow to different regions of the brain. Without knowing what they were drinking, about half of them said they preferred Pepsi. But once Montague told them which samples were Coke, three-fourths said that drink tasted better, and their brain activity changed too.
Coke “lit up” the medial prefrontal cortex (a part of the brain very much involved in higher cognitive processes). Montague’s hypothesis was that the brain was recalling images and ideas from commercials, and the brand was overriding the actual quality of the product. For years, in the face of failed brands and laughably bad ad campaigns, marketers had argued that they could influence consumers’ choices. The paper was a substantial contribution to the literature. Montague published his findings in the October 2004 issue of Neuron, and a new field of the neurosciences was born: neuromarketing. (1)
However, there are still some problematic unanswered questions from a neuroethics perspective.
(1) What effect did the Coke label have on the brain that the Pepsi label did not?
(2) What other evidence suggests that taste alone does not determine your favorite cola? Obesity is epidemic in America, and sugared soft drinks are one of the primary culprits.
(3) How might this research help doctors fight obesity?
(4) Suppose both the Coke and the Pepsi labels triggered the same reaction in the brain. What conclusion would you draw?
For a long time, marketing experts have relied on behavioral studies for guidance. In the USA, some companies are taking the practice several steps further, commissioning their own fMRI studies consistent with the research above. For example, in a study of men’s reactions to cars, Daimler-Chrysler has found that sportier models activate the brain’s reward centres as well as activating the area in the brain that recognizes faces, which may explain people’s tendency to anthropomorphize their cars. Steven Quartz, a scientist at Stanford University, is currently conducting similar research on movie trailers. And in the age of poll-taking and smear campaigns, political advertising is also getting in on the game. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles have found that Republicans and Democrats react differently to campaign ads showing images of the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks. Those ads cause the part of the brain associated with fear to light up more vividly in Democrats than in Republicans.
Gannon and Lawson in their scholarly article appear to develop their case that, if unregulated, this is dangerous:
“Excessive advertising turns a never ending series of new needs into new wants, and crowds out the space for other visions of the good society, where time and relationships matter more than what we buy. Advertising encourages us to run ever faster on the treadmill of modern consumer life; in so doing it contributes to growing consumer debt, a number of social problems which this report discusses, and to the very real prospect of climate change beyond our ability to manage. So the report calls for a tax on all advertising that encourages greater consumption to limit its scope and slow the pace of growth for the good of society and the future of the planet.”
There are in fact seven ways which Gannon and Lawson perceive as perhaps being capable of solving the problem: e.g. banning advertising in public spaces, controling advertising on the Internet, tax advertising, and probably, most contentiously, introduce statutory regulation of the advertising industry. This would be yet another example of where cognitive neuroscience meets the law in some way – exciting times indeed. If advertising is so rampant, should we spend money researching it like cancer?
References
(1) Jackie Ashley. Let’s take on the ads that fuel such waste, debt and misery. The Guardian, Sunday 24th February 2009.
(2) McGlure SM, Li, J, Tomlin, D, Cypert KS, Montague LM, Montague PR. Neural correlates of behavioral preference for culturally familiar drinks. Neuron 2004 Oct 14;44(2):379-87.
Panel discussion of the Compass Lecture 2011 (@compassoffice)
Compass New Year Annual Lecture 2011
These were the panel members’ views on Prof David Marquard’s treatise on the progressive left.
Ed Miliband
Miliband is ‘at a 30 year moment’ with the markets, which led to Thatcher, New Labour and the financial crisis. Nobody in politics has got to grips with the crisis. We should not be aspiring to going back to ‘business as usual’. In 1997, people were saying a tax-funded health service could not be sustained in the modern world, and that it was a crisis service (it should be paid for directly). The world has changed – but we do not operate a crisis service, and there is reason to hope. Miliband does not support necessarily everything which happened in the last term, for example PFIs, but he feels that the public realm needs accountability, some targets, and should not be strangled by an audit culture. ‘Limit the market, reform the state, and build the movement’. A redistributive welfare state is insufficient; a vision for politics must go beyond Tony Crossland, thus reaffirming Miliband’s insistence on the living wage. The reform of the state is important, as a centralized state cannot deliver, and the state must be devolved and more transparent; the more responsive state could be privatized state vs marketised state vs audited state.
Pulling the levers in government, but Miliband believes that there must be a wider movement which supports their cause. (Marquard believes the great strength of Barack Obama – the candidate – was to lead a movement). The Conservatives have their media, but Miliband emphasizes that Labour needs to work with other parties, and move away from tribalism. And finally – as for libraries. Miliband believes that there has been an intellectual collapse of the Big Society. No volunteering in schools as Sure Start centres have shut, and no more free debt advice as Citizens Advice Bureaux shut.
On the Liberal Democrat party - Ed Miliband feels that the current leader of the Liberal Democrats is betraying the tradition of the Liberal Democrats. He also feels that he will happy to share a platform with anyone who can bring a ‘YES TO AV’ vote more likely (read into that you will..!)
Caroline Lucas
The three main parties are wedded to privatization and marketization, but there should be a much wider debate about co-operatives and mutualism, for example. The private sector has devolved itself from wider obligations, such that business leaders has betrayed their moral obligations. The spread to the public sector, i.e. commodification of the public sector. Popular movements can help with the realignment with the public realm, for example in attempts to sell off the forests. Popular movements on their own ‘cannot do the job’, in that there has to be action on a political level. Political parties run the risk of becoming irrelevant, apart from the advancement of a professional political elite. This includes that there must be electoral reform (and this requires the Labour Party and Liberal Democrats to ‘share a platform’, according to Evan Harris.) Political parties are not necessarily representative of their members. Prosperity itself is often built on rotten foundations, i.e. exploitation of natural resources, and people around the world. For many years, progressive politics has failed to grasp the meaning of the word ‘equality’ seeing every human being on the planet being equal. Caroline Lucas – if we believe in equity and a responsibility for future generations – argues that there must be a rejection of the models of traditional political growth, exploring more how we live within our means.
Dr Evan Harris
Realignment of the progressive left means the growth of a social democrat society, meaning that you should be able to speak openly about issues such as health. Liberalism should not be defined necessarily by what the Leader of the Liberal Democratic Party says it is. It is suprising that we have to work so hard against the arguments that free markets are always a good thing. Dr. Evan Harris believes in rule of law, freedom and equity, as well as localism, for example. A freedom to consume and invest is considered essential by Dr. Evan Harris. The biggest failure was to tackle inequality – the combination of privatization and marketization, in that each one can be controlled on their own and not in combination. Choice can have devastating implications if you do not consider fairness and equity, for example in free schools and NHS hospitals. Finally, on cannot have fairness in private goods unless you have equal access to it. He therefore believes in an end of policy “tribalism” – not of a ‘join us’ variety but policy overlap. It is hard for the Labour Party to be the resting place of the progressive left.
Prof Francesca Klug (from the LSE)
The argument is one of ‘counter-materialism’ – there needs to be a realignment of the mind before the realignment of politics. Three inspiring people have espoused the rights of man (Pompayne), the dead weight of bureacracy (Weber) and various issues (George Orwell).
Prof Klug then went onto how Cameron had united small-state libertarians and social liberals, and this week’s Orwellian nature of Cameron’s argument. The Big Society is fundamentally about means, not ends, not telling us about the destination. The Good Society is about the type of society we wish to live in, where the dreams and optimism of youth are not crushed, competition does not snuff out public service, and where caring is an indicator of success, pluralism is respected, standing for the many does not become populism. State action must not squash out community spirit, more than head counting or a vote every five years. The progressive left is driven by ‘horizontalism’ – where young people are ‘doing it for themselves’. Effective democracies need political leadership, reclaiming the ‘moral foundation of politics’, ethical leadership (ethical in style, substance and tone), inspiring people to be better selves, and to keep the economy on track. Effective democracies lie at the heart of the progress.
A realignment of the mind: what way forward for progressive politics?
Compass New Year Annual Lecture 2011
Prof. David Marquand has written about the ‘unprincipled society’. He believes that successful societies must be underpinned by a moral case, and Neal Lawson, Chairman of Progress, argued that this was necessary for the progressive left.
Outside of the scope of the discussion is an analysis of political parties. Marquand argues that there should be a political, economic and moral cross-disciplinary discussion of ‘the truth’ for the future. Marquand argues that the conversation needs to start with the economic crisis of 2008, which was expected to trigger a departure of neo-liberalism orthodox using a precedent of 1930s and 1940s. No substantial economic leader appears to have echoed Roosevelt’s call ‘to drive the money changers’ from the temple. There is a sense of driving back to ‘business as usual’. Keynesians want to get back through stimuli, neoliberals strive for balanced budgets; the two groups disagree on the route, but not the destination, according to Marquand’s thesis. The crisis demonstrated, according to Marquant, that unrestrained capitalism does not necessarily work; private greed, e.g. created in hedge funds, are wealth destroyers, not wealth creators; wealth has not trickled-down; the self-regulated markets have demonstrated to be a phantom, which has produced outrageous inequalities causing a ‘turbo-capitalism’ not driven by rational economic actors but ‘electronic gamblers’.
No particular school of thought can therefore explain the economic crisis. Marquand believes that Marx has more to say than Keynes or Hayek, and wishes to look at three consequences of thus for public life.
‘The public realm’ as opposed to the buying-selling market. One of the great achievements of the late nineteenth century was to create the career civil-service driven by merit, Lloyd-George’s National Insurance Act, Bevin’s National Health Service. There is a flaw, in the sense that the guardians about the public realm forgot about the inherent voracity of rampant capitalism. They failed to see that the market domain is inherently expansionist, and is likely to invade or annex the public domain. Marquand argues that the Thatcher government and Nu Labour accelerated this through privatization and marketization – a long-drawn process of ideological colonization, akin to the Stalinisation of civil society. Wherever possible, public institutions were forced into a market mould. The corporate private sector provided the sole model, which encouraged a slide back to fiscal corruption (as demonstrated through ‘the expenses scandal’).
The Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition appears to have extended this. For example, the debaters focused on the impact of Lord Browne’s review of higher education on individual students of different backgrounds, but missed the impact of higher education on the public realm. For Browne and his colleagues, higher education in the arts and social sciences is a ‘private good’ or ‘commodity’, giving graduates a higher standard of living, which should be traded in the market-place. Subsidies should be freed up, like electricity and gas, so the market is truly free, thus allowing free choice between economically-rational students ‘drive up standards’. Marquand argues instead that the University should be where young people think critically, in helping people ‘to grow’, like public libraries, belonging to ‘the public realm’. Universities therefore become supermarkets satisfying individual wants. Browne’s review is part of a syndrome which goes back to the 1980s – Lansley’s reforms to the NHS are similar , conceptually.
The totemic word is ‘choice’. ‘People want choice’ according to Andrew Lansley (and also Alan Milburn’, as we live now in a consumer age.
The distribution of resources and life chances. The Labour Party is specifically egalitarian, but there was not much change in the income distribution in the post-war era. ‘The G coefficient’ measures income inequality; the higher the coefficient, the more unequal the society. In 1962, the coefficient was 0.26; in 1980, it was 0.25 in 1980; under Thatcher and New Labour, it rose. By 2007, it was higher than all EU states apart from a few; the UK was 8th, in terms of the numbers living in poverty. The UK is more unequal now than when New Labour came to power, and the UK is an ‘outlier’ in Europe, both in terms of poverty and income distribution, than any other country in heartland Continental Europe. Marquard believes that turbo-capitalism was the only way forward for economic growth.
Democracy It is often assumed that capitalism and democracy are natural bed-follows, explaining why the West approached the ex-Communist Worlds, for example. However, this is not true of China or Chile, for example. The basic promise of democracy is equal citizenship, in other words nobody has the right to rule over others without their basic consent. There is a built-in tendency for the inequalities in capitalism to spill over into the inequalities in democracy. For example, Frederick Hayek and Lord Salisbury have argued that democracy undermines capitalism because of the pressures for ‘resource distribution’, producing a dilemma for capitalist countries: “how can we reconcile the outer appearance of democracy with untamed democracy?” In the UK, the answer is what Stefan Colini from Cambridge has described as ‘market populism’.
Marquard argues that the total picture is bleak for a number of reasons. Marquand can detect “growth points” of a better society. Turbocapitalism has been legitimized by a passionately-held moral vision; unhindered pursuit of self-interest in free, competitive markets is not only economically efficient, but morally right. Collectivist interference might turn them into ‘moral cripples’ as described by Thatcher, in awe of choice and freedom of the individual. Not all choices are morally equal; freedom to ignore the moral good is not acceptable. We cannot go back to the highly structured, oppressive society, a debased culture which pervades the twentieth century. There are resources in social movements on which we can build, e.g. the burgeoning environmental movement, the National public libraries campaign. The notion itself is still alive. Edmund Burke, ‘the father of Conservatives’ considered society as a partnership between the living, the dead the unborn, an ethic which challenges turbo-capitalism. John Stuart Mill sees the freedom to develop and grow in civil associations contributing to the ‘worth’ of society. Ethical socialists see fraternity in the lived experiences of the Labour movement, different from the regime of the New Labour regime. Civil engagement, mutual learning and public reasoning constitute the way forward. In a book called ‘Not for profit’, democracy is not just head counting, but must be informed by daring decision and rich human relationships.
