Sentient Insight: the business blog for consumer psychology and consumer marketing

I took a break from some pretty intensive fieldwork this week to attend the evening event at the QRCA annual conference in Philadelphia. Because of my schedule I was sadly unable to attend the conference, but with some advance planning and the traffic working in my favor on rte. 95 I was able to make time for the event (I have my priorities after all). The QRCA evening event is always a great opportunity to meet new people and share ideas. Over cocktails I met some colleges I’d met at AQR/QRCA in Prague earlier this year and we had a lively discussion about the differences between online focus groups and online bulletin boards. I’m thankful I ran into them because they gave me a very helpful perspective based on their experience with these approaches.

Surely who we choose for a sexual partner is based on our conscious preferences, right? Perhaps not as much as you think. Apparently, the power of the subconscious is so substantial that male preference for romantic partners is dependent on how much change ($) we have in our pockets at the time of evaluating a mate for selection. In a brilliant experimental manipulation, Nelson and Morrison (2005) found that male preference for ideal weight of a romantic partner actually depends on whether we have money on our person when we are asked the question.

Some choices are hard to make, especially when the options we are faced with are nearly equivalent. Nevertheless we manage to make decisions every day and, buyer’s remorse notwithstanding, we frequently feel satisfied with our choices. And those previously attractive alternatives? Well, we tell ourselves, they were somehow lacking anyway.  But have we arrived at that conclusion through rational consideration of each alternative’s objective value, or do we subjectively—and retroactively—adjust the value we place on rejected options in order to feel better about the choice we made?

In 1996, behavioral psychologists Ulf Dimberg and Arne Öhman sought to test if the human mood is independent from its immediate external environment. Their study, Behold the wrath: Psychophysiological responses to facial stimuli investigated the affect of primed facial gestures on the participant’s mood. When I present these findings in talks, I usually tease that only a social psychologist could write a title like that. At Sentient, we affectionately call this study: Why am I so Happy? And the answer, as you will clearly see is, “I have no idea.”

The Garden Variety... How do we know what others are feeling? How do we gauge our audience in social interactions? Paul Ekman, a prominent psychological researcher, suggests that it’s all in our facial expressions. Even if you’re the type of person who keeps your emotions to yourself, Ekman’s research shows that humans are psychologically disposed to show our emotions on our faces.  Analyzing facial expressions in others, thus, is one way in which we empathize with other’s emotions. And it’s not always something you’re conscious of. Consequently, we don’t wear our hearts on our sleeves; we display them right on our faces!

The AMA’s 2010 Marketing Research Conference in Atlanta theme was “Unfiltered Perspectives. Unexpected Opportunities.” This conference provided an opportunity for both suppliers and clients to hear about specific case studies from many industries—including CPG, restaurants and consumer electronics—and also to hear about research industry trends.