The New York Times reported on April 20 that political consultants are placing people in M.R.I. equipment and showing them political commercials and other information and seeing what M.R.I. readings result. The consultants have found that they get different readings from Democrats and Republicans, depending on how the subjects feel about what is being displayed to them:
“[One subject] lay inside an M.R.I. machine, watching commercials playing on the inside of his goggles as neuroscientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, measured the blood flow in his brain. Instead of asking the subject, John Graham, a Democratic voter, what he thought of the use of Sept. 11 images in a Bush campaign commercial, the researchers noted which parts of Mr. Graham's brain were active as he watched. The active parts, they also noted, were different from the parts that had lighted up in earlier tests with Republican brains.”
What's interesting is this type of testing is not new. The article details how it has been used in other contexts:
“Though new to political advertising, brain imaging has been used to analyze other kinds of reactions to commercials, both by ‘neuromarketers' selling services to corporations and by academic researchers like Read Montague, who has studied brain responses to soft-drink advertising. He said research like Professor Iacoboni's could help expose manipulative techniques during political campaigns.” (Professor Marco Iacoboni is the lead researcher and “is an associate professor at the U.C.L.A. Neuropsychiatric Institute who directs a laboratory at the Ahmanson Lovelace Brain Mapping Center there.”)
The article details the different parts of the brain that are affected, depending upon how the subjects of the different parties view the ads. It also notes that the technique is still in the testing phase.
Are lawyers the next to test-run their cases by playing videotapes to juror-types who are in the M.R.I. equipment?
You can read the full text of the article at no charge until April 27 or 28. (Free registration is required.) Thereafter, the article costs $2.95.
Posted by ajlevy at April 23, 2004 11:28 AM