I have believed for a long time that asking people what they think is a desperately unreliable way to go about understanding what they really think.

Jessica Rabbit, the main love interest in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit famously complained, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way”.

I feel very similarly about people’s capacity for inaccurate portrayals of themselves, “They’re not bad, their brains are just designed that way”.

Of course, accepting that people are poor witnesses to their own thoughts is problematic:

1. It requires us to accept we might be similarly afflicted.
2. It means a lot of what passes for good judgment in terms of understanding consumers is not very good at all.

Once you start accepting the role of the unconscious mind in your own behaviour it can be very helpful. There are ways of guarding against making bad decisions (such as by making checklists) and when you’re aware of how something can influence you it’s possible to consciously react and avoid a problem.

It’s a little like with those scam phone calls. Just a few minutes ago I had a conversation with a very nice man who wanted to discuss a recent car accident that I could claim compensation for.

His tone suggested that he had knowledge of the event and I could easily have believed he was calling with my interests at heart.

Fortunately, I’ve learned to be wary of such calls and, once I’ve established they are bogus, I make the conversation fun (well, fun for me, at least): this time, when asked to recount the accident, I described a head-on collision with a UFO. Perplexed, the caller tried to check my personal details, at which point I questioned his authenticity, not by suggesting it was a scam call, but by suggesting he wasn’t a resident of planet Earth. He hung up.

Of course, such opportunist calls rely on the fact that, because they mention something that appears to be expert knowledge (rather than a guess that gets lucky every fifty calls), the misattributed credibility will be translated into business. Before you know it you’ve unwittingly given them information that can be fed back to you, and this further reinforces their credibility.

Regularly, studies emerge from psychologists’ experiments that show how people can be influenced without their knowledge. In short, we often act on the basis of what our unconscious ‘feels’, rather than because we are doing what our conscious mind would believe was in its best interests.

To reinforce how commonplace this is: yesterday I took my children to the supermarket. We needed to buy butter and there were two packs, 500kg and 1kg. I asked my children (aged 7 and 9) which pack would be better value. Even at that age they both trusted the unconscious heuristic that buying in bulk saves money, and opted for the larger pack.

As is quite often the case, once I’d forced them to do the conscious calculation, they realied two of the smaller packs would be the cheaper option.

As I said, such influences and biases are evidenced in numerous studies. However, this month, a UCLA neuroscientists reported on a study that went even further. It pitted the consumer against the expert and against the brain (neuroscientists scans of the participants brains).

Thirty smokers who were attempting to give up cigarettes watched three TV commercials that encouraged people to quit. All of them had a phone number that people could call to get further help. They were asked which ads they thought would be most effective: two emerged as better than the other.

Secondly, anti-smoking experts were asked to review the commercials. The experts agreed with the conclusions of the smokers.

The third part of the experiment added a twist. The smokers who were watching the ads had their brains scanned in an fMRI scanner.

The scans indicated that the part of the brain believed to be important when persuasion is taking place (part of the medial prefrontal cortex) was more active in the ad that both experts and smokers had said would be the least effective.

Faced with this contradiction the researchers had a problem: was the interpretation of the neuroscience wrong, or was it that people’s conscious analysis was wrong?

Fortunately they could find out.

The ads were broadcast so that the researchers could compare the volume of calls to the phone number referenced at the end of each advert.

It turned out that the brain scans were the best predictor of response: the ad they identified as being the most powerful generated three times as many calls as the next best performing one.

Whilst it is risky to generalise the relevance of this research too far: for example, not all ads are seeking to immediately persuade and generate a response, it’s further evidence that listening to what people say is far from reliable.

Source: E. B. Falk, E. T. Berkman, M. D. Lieberman. From Neural Responses to Population Behavior: Neural Focus Group Predicts Population-Level Media Effects. Psychological Science, 2012; DOI:10.1177/0956797611434964