- [Colin] We have a saying in neuroscience sometimes:
"Don't ask the person, ask the brain,"
because the brain activity may be something that's less
than fully conscious.
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My research is about behavioral economics and neuroeconomics.
And behavioral economics is using ideas from psychology
and other social sciences to make economics
a little bit more lifelike and fit human behavior.
The neuroeconomics part is that we actually try to see
what's happening in the brain
when people are making economic decisions.
Hypothetical bias is a term for when you ask somebody
whether they're going to something, but there's no actual consequences,
like a lot of surveys: "Are you going to vote?"
"Will you buy this new product we have?"
You tend to get a kind of upward "yes" bias.
People are more likely to say, "Yeah, I'd think I'd buy it,"
or, "Oh yeah, I'm planning to vote."
The hypothetical bias can be pretty high,
and it can be also retrospective.
So if you ask people did they vote,
70% say yes and really the answer was 45%.
One application is in things like marketing.
A lot of new products fail, and one reason they fail
is because when they test market it,
a lot of people said, "Yes, I'd buy it,"
who weren't going to buy it.
One thing that people have been chasing
in different fields in economics and psychology is
how can we measure the size of this bias and adjust for it.
So that if 70% of the people say they're going to buy a new product,
we know that the real number is 45%.
We did a couple of studies using brain imaging to say
is there a kind of signature in the brain of when
somebody says, "Yes, I would buy it,"
but when they really have to choose, they say no.
So we showed them pictures of different goods,
and the first part of the experiment, we asked them,
"Would you pay $27 for this backpack, yes or no?"
That's the hypothetical part, and then we kind of surprised them
when they come out of the scanner and we say to them,
"Oh by the way, now we're going to actually have you decide
to spend money so we're going to give you $50."
If you want to buy the backpack for $27, we're going to take it
out of your 50, so that now they have to make real decisions,
and then we study in the brain imaging,
could we tell what areas were saying yes,
but actually would later say no compared to the areas that said,
"Yes, I think I'll buy it," and, yes, they really did buy it.
And we found both more activity in certain regions associated
with valuation and then activity in different regions,
which were somewhat predictive of when a yes was going to turn
into, "Well, not really."
In some other studies on hypothetical bias,
we used eye tracking, which is a computerized way
of seeing what you're looking at for how long.
It also measures pupil dilation.
When you're aroused by something that you like,
or possibly you're scared, the pupil dilates a little bit.
So we used that method and then another method
using mouse movements.
And so we found that the mouse tracking
and the eye tracking actually could give us an idea
of when people would say, "Yes, I'm going to buy this product,"
but then they really didn't when they had skin in the game
and had to buy it.
The quicker a person moves a mouse to a box to click on something,
the more they like it.
It's like a fast trajectory, "I really like this."
A slow meandering trajectory is, "Well, I don't know. I'm not sure."
The motor activity in the mouse is actually an index in economic value
as well as some other things, like indecision.
We live in a kind of golden age of social science
in which we can measure things in lots and lots of different ways.
So one thing we've just begun
that I think it's going to be really, really fun
is in order to study habit and a bunch of other things.
We bought a smart vending machine, and a smart vending machine
is basically a vending machine in the back
and a giant iPad in the front.
So you could program the iPad to show whatever you want.
For example, if somebody buys habitually and you raise the price
by a few percent, do they just ignore that
because they're not even looking at the price?
Eventually, we'd like also to be able to use webcam cameras
to record so when I say somebody is not looking at the price,
I really mean they are not looking at the price
because the camera looked at where their eyes were looking.
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