How should marketting use understanding of the brain mechanisms of social influence to sell more?

Our 3rd session's paper claims that understanding the brain mechanisms of social influence have important implications for marketting and advertising. The question is now that this project has been completed and the experiments done and paper published what can marketting get from it that we did not know before the project? How should marketting USE this new information to do things better? To sell more what does this paper tell marketing?

What kinds of emotions encourage the consumer to purchase special commodities? The paper shows the firms a straight way leading to encourage the consumers to use their services. As mentioned in this study (our journal club), if researches come to this conclusion that liked people’s preferences have a long-lasting effect on changing the consumers’ choice, manufacturers can try to use popular people in their ads while they are using their goods or use disliked people while they are avoiding them. This is in comparison to using inanimate stuffs or neutral people that make weak or temporary effects. Maybe using the concept of mother in teasers is an unintentional use of this outcome.

The study says that the more your preference is far from a liked person’s, the more your preference would change towards him and vice versa for a hated person. So for example if a producer of home fitness apparatus wants to encourage fat and lazy people whose preferences are too far from buying the apparatus, he can show how much fat people are disliked in the society and especially by those who are liked by fat people. I mean that the ­OBJECT in the cognitive imbalance triangle could be one type of people instead of the specific advertised goods. Taking advantage of this study outcome, firms can conduct indirect advertisements which are not noticed clearly by consumers. In this way while they are actually encourage people to use their services, they avoid consumers’ unpleasant feeling towards direct advertising.

Business transactions surely involves more than a person; it involves other people and even the whole environment. So it is important to understand how people interact with each other or let’s say how the brain interacts with the environment. Standard economic theory assumes it is impossible to directly measure the feelings of the human heart or find out details about the functioning of the brain’s black box, rather feelings could only be assessed from behavior. Contrary to this, neuroscience has proved that the study of the brain and nervous system is beginning to allow direct measurement of thoughts and feelings, hence predicting the behavior. These measurements can, in turn, revise our understanding of the relation between mind and action, leading to new theories and calling old ones into question.

Session 3 | Social Manipulation of Preference in the Human Brain

It's a rainy day in Tehran!

Today we discussed : Izuma, Keise, and Ralph Adolphs. "Social Manipulation of Preference in the Human Brain." Neuron 78.3 (2013)

Rahele presented the paper for us, We believe that what makes this paper different from other resembling researches is its emphasis on "Balance Theory".

We discussed paper's experimental protocol, and we derived to this part :

We hypothesized that posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC),which includes dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), dorso-medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), and presupplementary motor area (pre-SMA), lays a key role in representing imbalanced states and subsequent preference change.

Bahador mentioned that their conjecture of pMFC's role in social imbalance is because pMFC answers to asymmetric situations.

We talked about the "fixed effect analysis" statistical technique which is used in figure 3.
Finally there are questions which people are going to write about and discuss :

1. How to represent this data in terms of balance theory?
2. Given what we know, what do we understand from marketing and advertising?

Session 2 | In the Mind of the Market: Theory of Mind Biases Value Computation during Financial Bubbles

In our second session Ali presented : De Martino, Benedetto, et al. "In the Mind of the Market: Theory of Mind Biases Value Computation during Financial Bubbles." Neuron 79.6 (2013)

Do all social species really need brain to brain coupling for communication?

This is my essay on the question asked at the end of the first session:

First of all I read some text on the internet and found that there are some species that are not social in the coverage of social definition, like Snakes & Tortoise; this is what I didn't think so before.

Anyway, in my opinion it is not a necessity to assign brain to brain coupling mechanism for all of social species; they may have some physical limbs (e.g. like wireless radar senders and receivers) to generate some kinds of communicative signals or they may use some kinds of body gestures which are instinctively or genetically defined to have a special meaning for them and can help them communicate with each other. Assuming these, there is no certain need to consider learning nor developing mechanism for them.

But for humans I think the case is different, meaning that in human’s interactions, they pass a learning process to be able to make a brain to brain coupling although the process might be very fast, unintended and not easily detectable. One possible mechanism for this learning could be synchrony, why not?; meaning that in the examples we saw in the paper, the two brains start to reach to a common frequency and phase, these characteristics may be one of the people’s who is acting dominantly or something between theirs.

I don’t exactly know what null hypothesis we are rejecting when we subscribe to the brain-to-brain coupling hypothesis, but I think there are many intuitive evidence in higher order levels of coupling that lead us to believe such a thing in lower levels. For instance telepathy or dreaming some friend who you have not heard of her for long calling you and the next day you receive an email of her (which has happened many times for me)

If we understand the nature of these seemingly coupling mechanism we can account for some daily phenomena like first impression which is vastly discussed in social psychology. Also we can understand which couples or people can have a better performance in their acting so that we can have more successful small socials in life or work and so on.   

Session 1 | Brain-to-brain coupling: a mechanism for creating and sharing a social world

On our first session we discussed: Hasson, Uri, et al. "Brain-to-brain coupling: a mechanism for creating and sharing a social world." Trends in cognitive sciences 16.2 (2012).

Bahador presented the paper for us, we had several problems in understanding different parts like first paragraph second page, where they claim that : 

Brain-to-brain coupling is analogous to a wireless communication system in which two brains are coupled via the transmission of a physical signal (light,sound, pressure or chemical compound) through the shared physical environment.

The phrase "wireless communication" was ambiguous to us, does it mean that we should strictly use a wireless technology to create a brain-to-brain coupling?
As we were going through the paper, we reached to the question "are all species social?", do we really need a "brain-brain" communication to understand complex behaviors?