Addictions 2010 Conference in DC

This weekend I am making the long road trip (I got unceremoniously bumped from Delta flight) down to Arlington, VA for the Addictions 2010 Conference. This conference is focused on bridging research and public policy in treating and diagnosing addiction. To me this is an extremely important issue. The speaker list is great: H.W. Clark, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, R. Morrison, National Association of State Alcohol & Drug Abuse Directors,H. Perl, National Institute of Drug Abuse and many academics doing work in this area! I will probably be the only consumer behavior researcher there...alas! Should be an eye opening weekend!

What Drives Hoarding Consumption? - Is It At Epidemic Levels?!

Every day I receive email alerts of news reports of extreme and dire cases of hoarding behavior. Animal hoarding is one form and maybe one of the more tragic since it impairs and debilitates both the human owner and the animals hoarded. But there are types of products hoarded and the problem is claimed to be at epidemic levels either because the public is only now being made aware of the problem lurking behind many barricaded and seemingly normal doorfronts or because there may be some underlying percipitating factor in modern society that is triggering the compulsive consumption behavior. My belief is that as a comsumer behavior researcher, this is one type of consumer behavior that demands much more research!!

The Biological Basis of Business Behavior

A recent article in the Economist discusses research that combines biology, psychology, endocrinology, and genetics to better understand business behavior such as risk perception, trust, and innovation. A colleague at Ivey, Rod White, for example published a paper with co-authors Stewart Thornhill and Elizabeth Hampson which found that men with higher levels of salival testosterone were more likely to be entrepreneurs. A really important area where this type of research could be applied is ethical behavior (see my recent blog post on the neural differences of psychopaths from the general population and possible links to management behavior), leadership and consumer innovators or trend leaders.

Looking for Experimental Stimuli: Use Images from Wikimedia Commons

I use tons (I mean thousands+) of images and ads as stimuli in my consumer behavior experiments. For the most part I spend a lot of time wading through stacks of old magazines that I collect in my office, ripping out ads and scanning them in for potential manipulation in Photoshop (by my helpful and talented technologist husband!!). This of course takes a lot of time!!

A good colleague of mine at Stanford directed me to a great resource for images that are royalty free at Wikimedia Commons. This is a great place to get an image of a brain, a camera or a smiling face...everything a researcher could want!! Thanks to those who allow their images to be used without the expectation of compensation!!

Image Source: Jal2001, Wikimedia Commons

Consumer Debt Sinking Seniors

I find it ironic that my parents' generation, the one who railed against the "establishment" and scoffed at their parents' frugality and conservatism, are now the ones suffering so terribly under the weight of extreme debt. An article today in USA Today states that older consumers have 50% more debt than younger ones and over 2/3 of older consumers who have filed for bankruptcy say that credit card debt was the major problem. It has been reported that most people file bankruptcy because of medical debt, but I don't think that is entirely true. I think the rampant, largely unregulated marketing of debt products, including credit cards, reverse mortgages (WTF is that good for????), student loans and other completely usesless manipulations of the financial industry have duped the older generation who during their young adulthood didn't spend a lot of time working on their self-control skills (just put the LSD down!). Now the pain of overconsumption is settling in on people who should be in their golden years...how do we help consumers who lack the ability (for whatever reason - e.g., does heavy partying and drug use during your younger years contribute to the inability to control compulsive behavior later in life? A research question for sure!!) to self-regulate and control compulsive behavior?

Image Credit: Lotus Head from Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

Setting Neurostandards?

The Advertising Research Foundation recently held a conference in NYC on setting standards for testing advertising using neuroscience tools such as fMRI and EEG. Participant research firms included Innerscope, Mindlab International, MSW/LAB, Neurocompass, NeuroInsight, Neurosense, Sands Research, and Sensory Logic. These companies represent a new wave of firms moving into this still controversial field of consumer neuroscience. Hopefully a communication between neuroeconomics researchers and practitioners in this field will result!

Are Some Business Executives Really Psychopaths?

An article today in Globe and Mail discussed how new brain imaging research is revealing more details on what makes some people psychopaths. It's thought that about 1% of the population is psychopathic and that criminals may be suffering from brain disfunction stemming from the disorder. The article also stated that the behaviors that are characteristic of psychopathy - manipulation, cunning, lack of empathy, inability to feel true emotion - may, in its functional form, also be the hallmark of CEOs and business executives. The disorder seems to stem from an abnormal structure of the amygdala - the brain structure responsible for processing fear - and the corpus callosum - which transfer neural information between the brain hemispheres. Interestingly, the corpus callosum is supposed to be more developed in women and those individuals with better social and emotional intelligence. An interesting question is whether these neural abnormalities could predict unethical behavior in business, think financial meltdown, and whether we are teaching and promoting the right set of skills in business schools where young people could be trained to counteract behavioral and cognitive deficiencies.

Transformative Consumer Research Conference June, 2011

The next Transformative Consumer Research conference will be held at Baylor University by my colleagues Brennan Davis and Connie Pechmann. The sessions sounds extremely interesting: Addiction, Risk and Young People, Poverty, Materialism. The crowd at the last TCR conference held at Villanova was an amazing group and the resulting JPPM article and book chapters in a new TCR book made attending well worth it. These are critical issues that consumer behavior researchers need to devote time and energy to understanding if marketing is to change its poor reputation! Consumers are suffering in many ways and research needs to discover the why and how in order to make consumers' lives better! The application deadline for the TCR conference is January 10, 2011.

Using Mturk for Experiments

Dan Goldstein at London Business School recently posted a great piece on using Amazon's Mturk to recruit participants for online experiments! One of the biggest impediments to getting research done is finding subjects to participate in studies...UC Irvine just recently put a limit on how many subjects could be recruited per study per semester...I collected data from 1600 subjects for my dissertation. A limit of 200 subjects really puts the breaks of data collection. If Mturk can offer access to potential participants, with a broader range of demographics (they aren't necessarily college students) for a realtively low cost (pennies per question per subject), then this could be a huge boon to researchers! We will be testing out Mturk in an upcoming study to see how running an experimental design works and whether there is any significant difference from our lab subject pool participants!