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

How behavioral science could have turned a multi-million dollar mistake into a multi-million dollar topline growth. When Netflix imposed a 60% increase in the prices consumers paid for their movie rental and streaming subscription service, naturally, consumers were not happy. Netflix did the rational math to determine price per subscriber and the percentage of subscribers per distribution channel etc., etc.  The logical math would have shown that only a small percentage of their consumers would be impacted and that they should press on with the increase.  However, underestimating the impact of consumer emotions and not factoring in the degree of those consumers around their willingness to pay more proved to be a critical misstep.

There is so much that we can see in this world, yet did you know what we can’t see can in fact be perceived by the brain? It sounds pretty scary when our behavior is influenced by factors that we can’t see or explain, but it is so true. This actually happened at the 23rd Annual Convention of Association of Psychological Science where a group of psychologists sitting in the same room were presented an invisible target prime by a French psychologist named Stanislas Dehaene. Dr. Dehaene has dedicated most of his research career to the study of consciousness using priming methods.

Ever wonder what goes on in the mind of people who drink impulsively? Most recently, research on its neural mechanism presented preliminary evidence of how such behavior is governed by the dynamic interplay between the automatic and the consciously controlled systems. In a study conducted at Claremont Graduate University, researchers including Dr. Susan Ames studied brain responses of heavy drinkers (those who consumed over 15 drinks a week and demonstrated binge drinking) and those of light drinkers, when these drinkers completed an Implicit Association Task involving alcohol related words paired with positive or neutral words.

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.