The findings are relevant to political advertising, commercial market research, and public health campaigns, and broaden the use of brain imaging from a diagnostic to a predictive tool.<\/p>\n As opposed to the wisdom of the crowd, the study suggests that the neurological reactions of a few \u2013 reactions that people are not even consciously aware of, and that differ from the opinions they express \u2013 can predict the responses of many other people to ad campaigns promoting specific behaviors<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u201cBrain responses to ads forecasted the ads\u2019 success when other predictors failed,\u201d says Emily Falk, lead author of the study, which appears online in Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.\u00a0 Falk directs the University of Michigan Communication Neuroscience Lab.<\/p>\n \u201cOur findings could help design better health campaigns. \u00a0This is a key step in reducing the number of smokers and reducing deaths from cancer, heart disease, and other smoking-related illnesses,\u201d Falk says.<\/p>\n The findings might also help produce more effective political campaign ads, and provide a neural roadmap to why some videos, fashions, behaviors, and ideas go viral, moving from one person to many thousands of others via social media.<\/p>\n Falk conducted the study with Elliot Berkman at the University of Oregon and Matthew Lieberman at UCLA.\u00a0 The researchers were supported by the National Science Foundation and by the National Institutes of Health.<\/p>\n For the study, the researchers recruited 31 heavy smokers with a strong desire to quit, and examined their neural responses to three anti-smoking ad campaigns, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).\u00a0 All the ads directly urged viewers to call the National Cancer Institute\u2019s tobacco quit line (1-800-QUIT-NOW).<\/p>\n Following the fMRI, participants rated the effectiveness of the ads they had just viewed in a variety of ways.\u00a0 The researchers compared their brain scans to their reports on the ads\u2019 effectiveness.<\/p>\n To obtain population-level measures, the researchers compared the number of calls to the tobacco quit-line in the month before and after each media campaign first aired in three different media markets.<\/p>\n When asked what they thought of the ads, participants\u2019 rated Campaign B the highest, followed by Campaign A and then Campaign C.\u00a0 Industry experts familiar with the campaigns also disliked Campaign C.\u00a0 \u00a0The three campaigns used very different strategies.\u00a0 Raters found Campaign C annoying and guessed that it would be ineffective.\u00a0 By contrast, Campaigns A and B resonated with participants, but in the end were less effective in actually driving calls to 1-800-QUIT-NOW.<\/p>\n But brain scans, which focused on the medial pre-frontal cortex, an area of the brain identified in earlier studies as linked to positive responses to persuasive messages, showed a completely different order, with Campaign C eliciting the strongest response.<\/p>\n At the population level, each ad campaign led to increases in call volume to the quit-smoking line, compared with a no-media control month before the launch of each campaign.\u00a0 The increases ranged from 2.8 to 32 times higher than the control month, and the researchers found that Campaign C led to the highest increases, followed by Campaign B and lastly Campaign A \u2014 just the opposite of the participants\u2019 guesses but precisely the same as their brain scans showed.<\/p>\n \u201cIt seems that the brain is picking up on important features of these ads, but we\u2019re not sure what these features are yet<\/strong>,\u201d Falk says. \u00a0\u201cWe\u2019re doing follow up studies now to translate what the brain is telling us about how to design better messages.\u201d<\/p>\n This study broadens the use of neuroscience data from predicting individual behavior to predicting the responses of much larger groups of people.\u00a0 \u201cIt seems that the brain can predict the responses of entire populations to ad campaigns,\u201d says Falk.\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cThe behavior of people whose brains are never examined may be inferred from the brains of a small \u2018neural focus group\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThese findings could help us improve the success of campaigns,\u201d Falk emphasizes.\u00a0 \u201cIn the long run, we hope this will help us fight cancer and other preventable diseases.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Association for Psychological Science press release: Brain scans of a small group of people can predict the actions of entire populations, according to a new study by researchers… Read more 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Brain scans of a small group of people can predict the actions of entire populations<\/strong>, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Michigan, the University of Oregon and the University of California at Los Angeles.<\/p>\n