The Happiness Industry Page 7
Elsewhere, neuroscientists believe they have identified the precise region of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, which triggers decisions to buy a product. Confirming the theory of psychology as a balancing act, one paper claims to have located the specific neural circuits which deal with pleasure and price respectively, the scales, as it were, on which every consumer decision depends.30 For the more optimistic disciples of Jevons, this is the brave new world that is dawning today.
Common sense suggests that these are absurd propositions. The sheer unlikeliness that the brain would ‘naturally’ operate according to principles first developed by economists in the 1860s seems overwhelming. Why would anyone believe that, in our fundamental biological nature, we operate like accounting machines? The answer to that question is simple: to rescue the discipline of economics and, with it, the moral authority of money.
After 2008, which witnessed the largest financial crisis since 1929 leading to the longest recession since the 1880s, this was the terrain in which a large number of apparently intelligent people believed political economy should be debated. Peering inside the brain would reveal what exactly had gone wrong. Thus it was not the strategic lobbying of banks against financial regulation from the 1980s onwards that was to blame. Nor was it the revolving door between the White House and Goldman Sachs. Neither was it the fact that investment banks were able to bribe credit-rating agencies into praising financial products that were full of junk. No. The problem that had struck the financial world was one of the wrong kinds of neurochemicals.
Explanations were legion. There were too many men in Wall Street, driven by too much testosterone!31 Too many of the bankers were high on cocaine, which led to dopamine being released when it shouldn’t have been!32 Bankers had simply forgotten about the biological flaws in their brains, which led them to be overconfident at the wrong moment (blame cavemen for not having evolved out of that one). They were victims of evolutionary malfunctions.33 In response, traders have discovered meditation practices as ways of trying to calm themselves to a state of better-calculated risk-taking. A medicine is offered by the company truBrain, a neurosupplement developed on the basis of EEG brain scans run on traders while trading, which promises better decision-making in the market. Some are simply fortunate to be endowed with brains that ‘tip them off’ when a financial bubble is about to burst.34
The neuroeconomic prejudice is that the mechanical, mathematical view of the mind ought ultimately to be correct. Of course there are anomalies, when neurochemicals are produced in the wrong quantity, or at the wrong time. But by tracing when these occur and building them into our calculations, the mind can be relied upon to perform its balancing act once more. The truth is that whenever policy-makers, economists or business leaders start to dabble in the neuropsychology of reward or incentives or dopamine, their agenda is really a different one altogether: to ensure that money retains its privileged position as the measure of all value.
A financial crisis represents an acute threat to the public status of money, raising the urgency of placing ‘value’ on firm foundations. The brain is simply the latest locus for these foundations, in a history that snakes back to the 1860s. Much of our interest in pleasure and happiness today derives from a tradition of economics that only requires sufficient theory of the mind, as is required by a free market economy. To suggest that such theories can be divorced from that political and cultural context is like trying to understand a set of kitchen scales without any understanding of what cooking involves. When the three young men in the Royal London Hospital recognized that neck pain equals compensation payout, they were simply exploiting an idea that is integral to our contemporary trust in markets. Unless the idea of fairness can be disentangled from the notion of ‘value for money’, with all of the psychological questions that the notion poses, philosophical quandaries such as whiplash will proliferate.
Markets are one context in which such ideas have been developed in the broader service of capitalism. But they are far from being the only one. Other economic and political institutions require quite different ways of imagining and measuring our pleasures and well-being. After economists shut the door on psychology during the 1890s, psychologists were free to engage in economic activity on their own terms, with their own paymasters. Different metaphors and assumptions about our minds came into play, with their own implications for how capitalism would develop. Our current preoccupation with quantities of inner happiness is as much a legacy of these, as it is of Jevons and those who followed him.
3
In the Mood to Buy
A sheet of metal with two square holes cut into it lies on a table-top, with a piece of rope attached to it. At the end of the rope, dangling from the table, there is an iron weight. At a given moment, a lever will be pulled, releasing the sheet of metal, which is then pulled violently across the tabletop by the weight. As it moves, the square holes quickly pass over an image drawn on the tabletop below, revealing it to an observer for a split second, and then concealing it again. The observer calculates precisely how long the image was revealed and makes a record of what impression, if any, it made on the eye.
This is how ‘tachistoscopes’ worked in Germany in the 1850s.1 At the time, they were used by physiologists researching human vision. Optical research examined various aspects of seeing, including light, depth perception, afterimages and how a pair of eyes constructed the image in three dimensions. The eye was to be probed and tested in search of different responses.
Today’s equivalent of a tachistoscope can operate, relatively cheaply, via an ordinary computer webcam. The movement of the eye can be tracked, as can the dilation of the pupil. The length of time that the eye settles on a particular image, or part of an image, can be timed to the nearest millisecond. Private companies, with names like Affectiva and Realeyes, deliver commercial services to clients wanting to know how to win and keep the attention of their audiences. These techniques often operate within more extensive face-scanning programmes, which promise to unlock the secrets of our emotional states. Face-scanning technology is spreading into everyday situations, such as supermarkets and bus stops, to help tailor messages appropriately for individuals. Of course, these twenty-first-century tachistoscopes are not being employed for purely scientific purposes. More often than not, eye tracking of this sort is done in the service of market research and targeted advertising.
Since the late 1990s, market researchers have become increasingly fixated upon our eyes and faces for tell-tale signs of what we might buy. Underlying this has been a growing belief that consumption is driven primarily by emotions. A 1994 book by the Portuguese American neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, entitled Descartes’ Error, exerted a profound influence across the advertising and market research industries. On the basis of brain scans, Damasio argued that rationality and emotion are not alternative or opposing functions of the brain, but on the contrary, that emotions are a condition of behaving in a rational way. For example, individuals who’d suffered brain damage hampering their emotional capacities were also discovered to be incapable of taking more calculated, rational decisions.
Damasio is now spoken of in hushed tones as the forefather of a mini-enlightenment in marketing theory and science. Gradually at first, but gaining momentum with the arrival of Malcolm Gladwell’s 2005 book Blink, every leading advertising and market research guru has come to view the emotional aspects of the mind and brain as the target for their ad campaigns and research. This has yielded such dubious legacies as neuromarketing and scent logos. Psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt push this further, to analyse the emotional underpinnings of moral and political choices.2
In a way, this sounds a little surprising. We have long known that advertisers target our unconscious desires and insecurities in their efforts to get us to buy their products. It was in 1957 that The Hidden Persuaders first claimed to pull back the curtain and reveal the manipulations and tricks that the ad-men were practicing on us. Perhaps it’s just that advertising
theory is unusually fad-based, and emotions are back ‘in’ again right now but will soon be usurped by another concept. There is also the fact that advertisers have long resisted the portrayal of them as ‘hidden persuaders’, insisting that it is impossible to get someone to buy something he doesn’t ‘really’ want. What’s new?
To many market researchers, the dawn of neuroscience has fundamentally changed things. According to the more optimistic among them, scientists are close to discovering the brain’s ‘buy button’, that specific area of mushy grey matter that triggers us to put an item in our shopping basket.3 The neuroscience of emotions potentially means that advertisers are no longer faced with a choice between thinking creatively and thinking scientifically: they can identify what forms of image, sound and smell produce emotional attachments to specific brands. Add to this advances in the computerized coding of eye movement and facial muscles, and you have the apparatus to really know what people are feeling. Some are using hormonal testing, to add to the mix.
So much technological progress has led to a surge of scientific exuberance in the market research community. Discovering whether or not an advertisement actually works in targeting a specific emotion and, with it, the propensity to buy something, is now a real possibility. An objective, quantitative science of desire seems feasible.
Various new findings are emerging as a result. The South African advertising guru Erik du Plessis has convinced many businesses – most crucially, Facebook – that whether or not we ‘like’ something exerts the greatest emotional influence over what we will then do.4 Another study has shown that fear is what drives people to buy products from big-name brands.5 Brian Knutson, a Stanford neuroscientist, has discovered that most of the pleasure associated with buying something occurs during the anticipation of receiving it, and has advised companies to structure their sales practices accordingly.6 Ways of reducing the ‘pain’ of the price tag – such as minimizing the number of syllables in the price when spoken – are also explored.7 The psychological pain of spending money is reduced when the customer uses a credit card than when they pay with cash.8
Positive psychologists and happiness economists make a great play of the fact that money and material possessions don’t lead to an increase in our mental well-being. But these experts are in a minority, compared to the vast assemblage of consumer psychologists, consumer neuroscientists and market researchers all dedicated to ensuring that we do achieve some degree of emotional satisfaction by spending money.
Less and less about our shopping habits is being left to chance. Advertisers will still swear that the ‘hidden persuaders’ image of them is inaccurate and unfair. After all, the emotions being targeted, generated and researched are not ‘fake’ in any way. This is not about lying to people. On the contrary, emotion has become the market research industry’s preferred version of happiness or pleasure, as they existed for Bentham and his followers. It is the solid neural, chemical or psychological reality which underpins everything else that we experience or think is going on. Most importantly, it is what leads us to get our credit cards out of our pockets. But in a way that Jevons might have respected, we don’t do so under the influence of lies or advertising ideology, but because we really will receive a quantity of positive feelings as a result. That, at least, is the claim.
As market research becomes increasingly swept up in this scientific exuberance, a number of questions are going unanswered. What precisely is an emotion anyway? It is all very well saying that it is a visible occurrence in the brain, but that doesn’t help us understand what we mean by the term, or by specific words such as ‘anxiety’, ‘joy’, ‘fear’, ‘happiness’, ‘hate’, ‘like’ and so on. It is difficult to imagine how one would explain or describe these occurrences to someone who had never experienced them, no matter how good one’s instruments of detection were.
Furthermore, it is deeply unclear within this new neuroindustrial complex where precisely agency lies. Are consumers considered to be sovereign, autonomous beings, whose emotions are constitutive of their free will and personality? Or are they passive vessels, who get emotionally buffeted by the images, sounds and smells that come before them? Marketers would hesitate to declare the latter, and yet their methods are scarcely compatible with the former view either. Maybe they don’t really know. Accrediting decision-making to the brain is the preferred way of ducking this philosophical dilemma.
While the scanning technology that promises to unlock the secrets of our feelings is dazzlingly new, the philosophical and ethical questions that result from it are quite old. This points us to a recurring pattern within psychological research that dates back to those first optical tachistoscopes of the 1850s, and it concerns the mesmerizing lure of mind-reading technologies. With every wave of new methods and instruments for scanning the thought processes or sensations of others, so there occurs a resultant belief that hard science has ousted philosophy and ethics once and for all. At the same time, there is always the hope that it is possible to understand another human being without talking to them.
But on each occasion, there is still some residual vision of what freedom and consciousness really mean that escapes scientific validation. When psychologists, neuroscientists or market researchers claim to have liberated their discipline from moral or philosophical considerations once and for all, the question has to be posed – so where do you get your understanding of humanity from, including its various emotional states, drives and moods? From your own intuition? And what feeds that?
In the years since those first tachistoscopes were introduced, the answer has become increasingly plain. The residual notion of freedom that structures how this science progresses is the freedom to shop. If that is the case then contemporary neuromarketing and facial coding might rightly be accused of being a circular venture. What they discover in the synapses of our brains and the flickering of our eyes is not raw data, to be injected afresh into advertising designs, but is unavoidably interpreted through a consumerist philosophy.
Therefore we need to examine the history of psychology and the history of consumerism as intertwined projects. Technology is absolutely integral to this entanglement. It is thanks to technical methods and instruments, from the tachistoscope onwards, that psychology can claim to be its own objective science in the first place. The seductive power of such instruments has allowed certain individuals to declare that philosophy and ethics are no longer needed. It is here that much of the Benthamite promise of a scientific politics has been channelled, a politics in which hard expertise over the feelings of others replaces the messiness and ambiguity of dialogue. But behind this version is not national government in pursuit of a public interest, rather a corporation in pursuit of a private one.
Between philosophy and the body
In 1879, a former physiologist and occasional philosopher named Wilhelm Wundt declared that a certain part of his office at Leipzig University had become off limits. Henceforth, it would be used for carrying out experiments, not unlike the ones he’d helped arrange when working as an assistant to the great German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz in Heidelberg during the 1860s. He’d also practised physiological experiments on human muscles while training to be a doctor. Wundt was never short of self-confidence, and at one point promised to reveal the truth of muscular reflex once and for all.
But Wundt also had philosophical ambitions, which he didn’t intend to relinquish entirely for the sake of the natural sciences. He was convinced that, while mental processes could occur spontaneously, they also occurred at a certain ‘speed’, which could in principle be measured. The purpose of his new experimental space was to explore such philosophical questions, using techniques and instruments that he’d picked up from the physical sciences. Human subjects would be used, just as they had been when he was testing muscular responses.
That sealed-off area of Wundt’s office is now recognized as the world’s first-ever psychology laboratory. The physical delineation of the laboratory was highly symbo
lic, resulting in a disciplinary separation of psychology from the areas of theory and science on which it had previously been dependent. Forms of psychological research had been conducted across Europe since the early nineteenth century, often including elements of experimentation, as exemplified by Fechner’s weight lifting. But these were conducted from within physiological and/or philosophical traditions of enquiry, and were typically carried out by researchers upon themselves, meaning they relied on introspection for their data. Wundt’s achievement was to distinguish psychology as a discipline of its own, potentially separate from both physiology and philosophy.
In doing this, he made a statement with profound and far-reaching implications for how we understand ourselves and others. What Wundt effectively implied was that the psyche hovers in its own specific domain, between the realm of natural biology and that of philosophical ideas. Bentham had established a sharp binary opposition between the matters of ‘reality’ (for which read natural science) and those of nonsensical ‘fiction’ (for which read metaphysics). Wundt was adding a third option: a form of reality which we can acquire knowledge of but isn’t reducible to the laws of nature. This includes the various categories that we recognize as ‘psychological’ today: ‘mood’, ‘attitude’, ‘morale’, ‘personality’, ‘emotion’, ‘intelligence’ and so on.
How could these apparently intangible, conceptual entities become an object of scientific investigation? Wundt was keen to avoid resorting to introspection of the sort that many English psychologists had used during the 1850s and 1860s. The purpose of the laboratory was to study mental processes in a more objective fashion than that. He and his assistants built various tools to test the response of experimental subjects to different stimuli. They also borrowed various instruments from physiology and physics labs to time neural reflexes. And they built their own version of a tachistoscope, which was used to time how long it took to get a person’s attention. The eyes were a crucial area of study for the pioneering psychologists, but not merely in a physiological sense. Now they provided a glimpse of thinking itself.