Consumer Neuroscience

Questions: 1. What are the strengths and limits of explicit and implicit measures of attitudes? in what ways can neuroscience provide better answers? 2. What is persuasion: definitions and most common paradigms? Answers: 1. Explicit attitudes are those that exist at a conscious level and are formed by an individual deliberately. Attitude formed at an unconscious level are implicit in nature and are formed by an individual involuntarily. In consumer and media neuroscience, the implicit measure of the attitude is the assessment of the automatically activated attitudes influencing our spontaneous decisions and outcomes. The explicit measure of attitude allows a person to select a correct response on the measurement scale by deliberating on their attitude. The implicit measure of article such as- Evaluative Priming Measure (EMP), Implicit Attitude Test (IAT) and Misattribution procedure (MP) are commonly used and the explicit measures includes Likert and Semantic Differentiation Scales (SDS) which are known as traditional self-report measures (OKeefe, 2015). The strength of EMP and Misattribution process is its strong reliance on research in social and cognitive psychology giving the investigator a clear sense of mechanism behind a process. EMP is limited due to low reliability and produce estimates that are not related to IAT assessments. The weakness of IAT includes its reliance on the interpretation of the psychiatrist, which has controversial outcomes. However, it is useful in assessing clients with ambiguous symptoms. Both IAT and MP give highly reliable and valid estimates, which are the strength of these measures. Overall, these measures greatly contribute to understand the attitude-to-behavior process processes. The strength of Likert scale is that the measurements are quantifiable as an individual is allowed to respond in a degree of agreement rather than giving a yes/no answer. The drawback of this scale is that attitude of population towards particular item exists on multi-dimensional continuum whereas this scale provides the respondent with 5-6 choices which fails to give true measure effecting the reliability and validity of the outcome . The strength of SDS is its high reliability and versatility of the outcomes and is widely used in obtaining customer feedback and assess their emotional attitude towards a product. However, its limitation is the ranges used which does not have one correct answer that is the difficulty in selecting correct number of points in scale (O'keefe, 2015). 2. According to OKeefe, (2016), persuasion is defined as an intended communication by an individual to modify or extinguish the beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors of the listeners within the constraints of given communication context. For example, the advertisements on television influence the consumer to develop preference for particular brand of cosmetics or electronic gadgets by influencing their cognition and memory. This phenomenon is underpinned by persuasion theory. An attractive advertisement and the emotions expressed by person in an advertisement triggers changes in the brain activity. It is the reason why some commercials of more than 1.5 seconds duration remain memorable and influences our decision-making (O'keefe, 2016). The law of contrast is commonly used paradigm in media where consumers are influenced to prefer $ 120,000 home instead of $90,000 although both are present in same location. The problem, cause and solution paradigm influences the mode of thought by enhancing individuals logic and emotion causing them to align with the interests of persuader. Further, consumers are attracted to blogs or Twitter with lakhs of followers is the social proof of reciprocation paradigm of consumers in turn of support network given by a company (O'Keefe, 2016). References OKeefe, D. (2016) Persuasion: Theory and Research (Third Edition). Sage Publications. Thousand Oaks, CA. O'Keefe, D. (2016). Evidence-based advertising using persuasion principles: predictive validity and proof of concept.European Journal of Marketing,50(1/2), 294-300. O'keefe, D. J. (2015).Persuasion: Theory and research. Sage Publications.