| |
|
It's a bunch of crap really, as it relies on pretty outdated, but still popular conceptions of neural determinism and behavioural psychology (ala Skinner's rats in a cage pressing levers to get pellets of food). All kinds of marketing, neural or traditional, tries to induce, at a minimum, feelings of liking or disliking towards some phenomenon by associating that phenomenon with other stimuli that appear either negative or positive to the recipient. Repeat this process, or piggyback it on existing, already learned association chains, and voila, one is supposed to reinforce a particular response towards the phenomenon in the recipient.
This picture, however common-sensical in marketing and psychology, is mostly wrong. Take an example from the field of addiction. The received wisdom is that taking drugs with addictive properties (itself a nebulous concept) is self-reinforcing, so that doing, say, heroin, in almost all cases leads to an addiction over which the user has little to no control. The lack of control is postulated to result from the formation in the brain of powerful chains of intensely pleasurable stimuli responses which reinforces the intention (or habit) to take yet more drugs. The combination of massive amounts of psychopharmacological and behaviouristic research into addiction purports to show that no matter the environment, the animal (rats were often the favoured model organism) was helpless to shake the habit. Enter Bruce Alexander, a Canadian psychologist who had worked with addicts in the 70's. I'll quote from an article that I highly recommend you read:
When Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs in the early 1970s, it was generally believed, as it is today, that drugs cause addiction as surely as lightning causes thunder. At that time, Bruce Alexander was counselling addicts in Vancouver’s infamous Downtown Eastside, and he wasn’t so sure. “Junkies say things like ‘I can go through the withdrawal, and I can stop, but I don’t want to stop,’” Alexander says. “We’re not supposed to believe it; we’re supposed to say they’re denying that they’re in the grip of this drug, but they’re not, really. I believed them.”
What irked Alexander was that the previous rat experiments had all taken place with procedures where the rats were in an environment that was highly unlike what they would normally inhabit in nature. They were typically alone in small, naked boxes, far removed from their typically more spacious, varied colonies. What he did was to create the Rat Park, placing rats in large cages that rather successfully mimicked their natural habitats. I'll quote again from the article:
Rats in Rat Park and control animals in standard laboratory cages had access to two water bottles, one filled with plain water and the other with morphine-laced water. The denizens of Rat Park overwhelmingly preferred plain water to morphine (the test produced statistical confidence levels of over 99.9 percent). Even when Alexander tried to seduce his rats by sweetening the morphine, the ones in Rat Park drank far less than the ones in cages. Only when he added naloxone, which eliminates morphine’s narcotic effects, did the rats in Rat Park start drinking from the water-sugar-morphine bottle. They wanted the sweet water, but not if it made them high.
In a variation he calls “Kicking the Habit,” Alexander gave rats in both environments nothing but morphine-laced water for fifty-seven days, until they were physically dependent on the drug. But as soon as they had a choice between plain water and morphine, the animals in Rat Park switched to plain water more often than the caged rats did, voluntarily putting themselves through the discomfort of withdrawal to do so.
Huh. Pretty counter to the recived wisdom, no? So, I hear you asking, what has this got to do with marketing? Well, ultimately the point is that even intensely pleasurable or painful stimuli have their effects modified by the environment, so that there is no straight and a priori predictable causal chain that leads from [properties of X] to [response to X]. So, in that sense, it matters little what parts of the brain lights up in an fMRI scan when people are exposed to a certain stimuli. Without what experimenters call ecological validity - i.e. placing people in naturalistic settings, these results must be viewed with extreme scepticism. In the words of one of Alexander's colleagues:
However, humans have complex responses to even simple stimuli. We all know how satisfying a big glass of water is on a hot day, and a good meal when we're hungry. But would you like 22 pieces of chocolate cake after the meal? How about a big glass of cold water when it's freezing outside? Perhaps half a bottle of whisky just before your driving test? Why not?
Suddenly we are far past the Skinner box into the real world, where a piece of chocolate cake is only rewarding if you want it. It can be aversive if you really wanted the crème brûlée instead, or you sense that your date, who is on a diet, will suffer while they watch you eat dessert. In humans, pleasure critically depends upon one's circumstances, and it takes many surprising forms. People are pursuing pleasure when they line up for a roller-coaster ride, paying to be scared half to death and giggling with delight in the midst of a cardiovascular crisis. Others are fans of "The Simpsons", where year after year, cartoon characters subject each other to unending emotional abuse. Some people love to be whipped, and others welcome water-boarding. |
|
|
