[ExI] LA Times: Peeking inside voter's minds

[PJ Manney]

Neuromarketers... neuropolitics... makes me want to reach for my
neuromartini.  Or to quote a critic at the end of the article:

"Voters think that consultants spend all their time manipulating and
packaging candidates and this will make them even more suspect," she
said. "Manipulating the brain -- it's too much the magic man behind
the curtain."

Gee, what would make us think that?  (Maybe we could just take a
little peek and find out...)

PJ

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-sci-polbrain10feb10,1,4203850.story

>From the Los Angeles Times
Peeking inside voters' minds
With neurologists' help, political consultants can track exactly what
audiences will respond to, and how. But it's far from an exact
science.
By Denise Gellene
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

February 10, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — Wearing electrode-studded headbands to track their
brain waves, two subjects watched the campaign commercial on a monitor
in front of them.

Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, clutching a microphone
as she spoke to an approving crowd, promised that people in need would
never be "invisible" to her.

When the volunteers heard "invisible," the equipment registered a jolt
of electricity in their frontal lobes.

"It got their attention," said Brad D. Feldman, an analyst for EmSense
Corp., which conducted the test at its headquarters in a converted
warehouse here.

Campaigns have always wanted to looked inside voters' heads. This
election season, neuroscience is making that possible.

Arguing that the brain reveals more than spoken answers to questions,
a new breed of campaign consultants known as neuromarketers is hawking
cutting-edge technologies that they believe can peer into the
subconscious of the electorate.

The companies have already used their technologies to test commercials
for beverages, video games, software, cellphones and other consumer
items. Advertising Age, the marketing bible, has identified
neuromarketing as one of the year's top industry trends.

"People are always searching for better ways to test advertising,"
said veteran Democratic consultant Bill Carrick, who helped run Rep.
Richard A. Gephardt's 1988 presidential campaign. "The truth is that
it is very difficult sometimes to gauge the effectiveness of political
advertising before it goes on the air."

Each of the companies employs different technologies, largely adapted
from medical research -- pupil dilation, eye gaze and brain activity
using a functional MRI scanner. EmSense's device tracks changes in
brain waves, blinking, breathing and body temperature -- reactions
that might indicate attention, boredom or emotional arousal. The
headband transmits its information to a computer that uses a
mathematical formula to determine whether the viewer's subconscious
response was positive or negative.None of the companies has landed a
job with a presidential candidate, and some experts question whether
the technology is any better than the usual political crystal-ball
gazing.

But given the high stakes of the campaign, experts say that even a
slim possibility of tapping voters' inner thoughts may be too
tantalizing to pass up.

"At the end of the day, consumer goods and candidates are both
products," said EmSense cofounder Tim Hong.

Manipulating image

The idea that candidates can be promoted like mouthwash -- and that
voters can be manipulated like shoppers -- dates back at least to
Richard Nixon's successful campaign, detailed in Joe McGinnis' book
"The Selling of the President 1968."

In steps that seem elementary now, Nixon's handlers shot separate ads
for Southern districts and Northeastern cities, and figured out how to
make their candidate appear more relaxed in front of the camera. Since
then, research techniques such as focus groups, scripted surveys and
data mining have become standard campaign tools.

But the problem with opinion research is that some voters say what
they think interviewers want to hear.

Alex Lundry, senior research director with the Virginia-based market
research company TargetPoint Consulting Inc., noted that the failure
of several key polls to project Clinton's victory over Barack Obama in
the New Hampshire primary shows current methods aren't adequately
capturing what's on voters' minds.

Neuroscience might help uncover deep-seated attitudes about race and
gender that voters might not otherwise reveal -- information that
would be especially relevant in the current presidential campaign
whose contestants include a woman and an African American, he said.

"It's like a focus group of the mind," Lundry said.

Recent research suggests a role for the subconscious in political
decisions. In December, scientists from the University of Washington
and Harvard University reported that many people who said they favored
Obama in an informal Internet survey preferred Clinton when
subconscious reactions were taken into account.

Although some analysts disagree, University of Washington professor
Anthony Greenwald said the results seemed to confirm an ongoing
"Bradley effect," the phenomenon named after former Los Angeles Mayor
Tom Bradley, a black Democrat, who narrowly lost the 1982 California
governor's race to George Deukmejian, a white Republican, even though
polls put Bradley up to 22 points ahead. The theory is that some
voters will tell pollsters they intend to vote for a black candidate,
then vote for a white candidate.

EmSense was founded by former MIT students who initially wanted to use
brain waves to control video games. Instead, they started using their
device, which is based on electroencephalography, or EEG, to help game
developers modulate emotional responses to twists and turns in the
action.

After that, the company turned its attention to testing commercials.

The goal is to stir up emotion. "I like to think of it as the reason
[composer] John Williams is so successful," Hong said. "How can we
create what he does naturally? What are the key messages that resonate
with people?"

The theory is that electrical activity in the brain changes when
emotion is experienced. The device picks up second-by-second
fluctuations in the brain -- those in the right prefrontal cortex
indicate anger or sadness while changes in the left prefrontal cortex
signal enthusiasm. This information is processed with other
physiological signals that measure emotional and cognitive reactions
-- producing fever charts that track the intensity of "like" and
"thought." Exactly what these changes reveal about specific
advertising is a matter of interpretation.

What fires up circuits

EmSense has so far measured the reactions of more than 100 test
subjects to campaign ads that have run in Iowa and New Hampshire.

When Bill Richardson, who has dropped out of the race, listed his
accomplishments in one TV ad, viewers' brain waves flattened,
indicating a lack of interest. When an Obama ad cataloged his
newspaper endorsements, it also failed to generate much electricity.

By contrast, Clinton's use of the word "invisible" caused viewers'
brain circuits to fire. Feldman surmised that the commercial tapped
into subconscious fears and "created a need for the candidate."

After capturing subjects' brain waves, EmSense asked viewers to choose
a few words to describe the ads. Although they called the Clinton ad
"caring" and "strong," their description of the Obama spot as
"hopeful" and "inspirational" showed they weren't completely in touch
with their inner responses.

"They definitely weren't inspired," Feldman said.

TargetPoint, which worked with the Mitt Romney campaign, has taken a
different approach, using an Internet survey that captures not only
the answers to political questions, but also how quickly voters
entered them; faster responses meant stronger convictions.

The results of the survey, which Lundry said was conducted as an
experiment last summer, revealed a deep commitment among Mike Huckabee
backers at a time when most national polls counted him out. That
dedicated support might help explain why Huckabee was able to leverage
a small base to became a serious contender, he said.

For all the high-tech sheen of the neuromarketers, skeptics say there
is a limit to brain-tracking technologies.

Darren Schreiber, an assistant professor of political science at UC
San Diego, who has used brain scanners in his research, said the
devices can't predict how people will vote. "People don't necessarily
act on their subconscious thoughts," he said.

Hong, from EmSense, agreed that there was a degree of uncertainty in
interpreting results. "There's no vote button in the brain," he said.

Several prominent researchers last year criticized the scientific
validity of a study by Washington-based neuromarketers FKF Applied
Research Inc. that used brain images from an MRI scanner to measure
the emotional responses of undecided voters.

Pictures of Clinton activated the anterior cingulate cortex, an area
that deals with emotional conflict. UCLA psychiatrist Joshua Freedman,
who cofounded FKF, and William Knapp, both Democratic strategists,
said the scan revealed an ambivalence about Clinton that could explain
why voters snubbed her when she was ahead in Iowa but then rallied
behind her in New Hampshire.

But University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Martha J. Farah says the
brain is complex and scans interpreted to indicate anxiety, for
example, could have signaled happiness because particular brain areas
process many emotions. "The scattered spots of activation in a brain
image can be like tea leaves in the bottom of a cup -- ambiguous and
accommodating of a large number of possible interpretations," Farah
wrote on the Neuroethics and Law Blog, a key website for
neuroscientists.

Beyond the questions of science, political consultant Cathy Allen, a
director of the American Assn. of Political Consultants, wondered
whether the American public was ready for neuropolitics.

She said the technologies could backfire -- especially during an
election season in which voters are demanding authenticity from their
candidates. Neuroscience could get in the way of establishing an
honest relationship with the electorate, she said.

"Voters think that consultants spend all their time manipulating and
packaging candidates and this will make them even more suspect," she
said. "Manipulating the brain -- it's too much the magic man behind
the curtain."

denise.gellene at latimes.com