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

Philosophers have long been interested in how and why people make judgments in moral dilemmas. Imagine the following scenario (let’s call it the “switch scenario”): a trolley is heading down the tracks toward five people. The only way to save those five lives is to hit a switch that diverts the track down a different track which will kill one person. During this scenario, most people would agree that it’s morally OK to kill the one person to save five others. This is referred to as a utilitarian judgment.

The Association for Psychological Science held its 23rd annual convention from May 26 to May 29 in Washington, DC. This year’s convention featured innovative research at the forefront of psychological science across a wide range of domains, with a strong focus on the neural mechanisms of various social and cognitive processes, including implicit cognition, consciousness, economic decision making, as well as moral reasoning. Many of these topics provide great insight for advancing our understanding of the drivers of human motivation, and are highly relevant to the subconscious consumer research at Sentient Decision Science.

Take a look at this image. What do you see? You might be saying: “This is a smiling car.” Is this car really smiling?  I don’t think so.  People smile, and maybe animals, but not cars. But if you see a smiling car, you’re not crazy.  You’ve just “anthropomorphized” it. This means that you’ve imagined it as a person.