Buying In - (Page 50) 50 rob walker on. Kahneman was eventually awarded a Nobel Prize in economics. The lessons of behavioral economics are often applied to stock market investing and the like, but the field offers a challenge to Consumer Economicus as well: While the rational factors that we think of as guiding our purchase behavior— price, quality, and so forth—all involve conscious decision making, what we buy is affected by a host of nonconscious factors. This is why the study of nonconscious effects on consumer behavior did not disappear in the 1950s. Today, however, such research is carried out not in the theaters of New Jersey, but at top universities, by way of peer-reviewed research papers or even taking high-tech pictures of neurons firing in the human brain. remember the magic? The Yale Center for Customer Insights, for example, was founded in 2005 and is overseen by an affable and lively-minded man name Ravi Dhar; its “corporate affiliates” include IBM, Samsung, Pepsi and Procter & Gamble. And it has conducted a number of research projects that suggest a few ways the interpreter works in real time. One such experiment examined how “nonconscious priming” can affect consumer choices. It built on several earlier strains of research showing, for example, that “priming,” in the form of subtly exposing subjects to particular words, can make people in certain situations more polite, or hostile, or cooperative—and that people generally failed to link the priming and the change in their behavior. The Yale researchers decided to look at whether “priming for sophistication” would
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