Group items tagged

the insula, a region they say is linked to feelings of love and compassion. So they concluded that because they saw activation in the insula, this meant the subjects loved their iPhones. Now there's just one problem with this line of reasoning, and that's that the insula does a lot. Sure, it is involved in positive emotions like love and compassion, but it's also involved in tons of other processes, like memory, language, attention, even anger, disgust and pain.

You've probably heard of it. So, Dr. Love bases his argument on studies showing that when you boost people's oxytocin, this increases their trust, empathy and cooperation. So he's calling oxytocin "the moral molecule."

Trial or no trial, these claims are front and center on their label right next to a picture of a brain. And it turns out that pictures of brains have special properties. A couple of researchers asked a few hundred people to read a scientific article. For half the people, the article included a brain image, and for the other half, it was the same article but it didn't have a brain image. At the end — you see where this is going — people were asked whether they agreed with the conclusions of the article. So this is how much people agree with the conclusions with no image. And this is how much they agree with the same article that did include a brain image. So the take-home message here is, do you want to sell it? Put a brain on it.

In business we regularly have to consider what level of risk is acceptable to the organisation. Management control systems typically assume that people adhere to some rational decision rules and are able to estimate the probabilities and values of future outcomes.

Pre-neuro behavioural studies have shown that this is most often not the case. Moreover, the way in which alternatives to a decision are presented to people affects their opinion about them and their choice between them.

Behavioural economics shows that if alternatives are framed as gains, decision-makers usually opt for safer options, thereby exhibiting risk-averse behaviour, but they reverse their choice when alternatives are framed as losses.