Brain scanners to be used to 'design' political candidates Sinister news today, as psychologists in the US unveil plans for so-called "neuromarketing" - the use of magnetic-resonance brainscans to maximise the appeal of products while they are being designed. Dan Ariely and his colleague Gregory S Burns - professors in the fields of psychology, behavioral economics, psychiatry and " …
...because it is all bollocks.
An NMR scan might tell you something about a few individuals' subconscious reactions to stimuli, but it won't tell you anything about how those same individuals make conscious decisions, and therefore won't be useful to politicians unless we assume that the average voter does not engage any conscious thought processes at all before casting a vote.
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how those same individuals make conscious decisions
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A "conscious decision" is just the brains cheesy after-the-fact rationalization of the outcome of the human decision-making process - which happens to have more in common with a Pachinko machine than people like to realize!!
IOW - there are few "conscious" decisions!
What they'll get out of it is that we're all royally teed off at having advertising thrown at us.. And that building the "ideal political candidate" will entail having one be honest, do what they say, and be practical and pragmatic rather than throwing money and zeal at all the political fringe stuff in the hope of sounding "modern and progressive and fluffy". If they get that message out of it, then maybe some good will come.
Really, I rather do expect it'll be used as a way to find extra weasel space for them upset everyone but make sure it doesn't last long enough to hamstring them the next time they're up for election.
Esc because it's always in the same plane as the end.
The human brain likes to fill in empty voids thereby creating order and meaning. Thus it follows that the most electable candidate will be the most empty and vacuous, who's speeches can mean anything (or nothing) being entirely made up from plus-words, sound-bites and random quotations.
Everyone fills in their own interpretation of the noise and is therefore convinced that they agree entirely with the candidate - because the candidate is a mirror-image of themselves.
...It will be hard to beat Obama at this game, but it will certainly be done. As long as she's got big tits, we will not be worse off than now.
This is marketing hype aimed at marketing pros. What will an advertising
exec with no ideas and a wad of cash spend do? He will get the magic
scientifical mind reader machine to do his ad campaign for him. Never
mind that it in reality it will be marginally more effective than administering
the standard marketing exam asking the test subject to rate
like/dislike/how strongly, the same questions. And the tinfoil hat crowd will
give this additional credibility. Even if the marketing exec knows it isn't
magically going to invent the new killer product he could definitely
convince his CEO of that and cover himself later with "it was cutting edge
science"
It's one thing to elect a president - let's admit Obama's backers mounted an effective campaign. But I would really like to see this idea go, in particular to see what they come up with to keep Santa's ratings from changing in a way everyone can believe in. Mr Bojangles doin' the ol' soft shoe, perhaps? Or maybe, just maybe, implementing the policies he was elected on?
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