Buying In - (Page 58) 58 rob walker the potentially pleasurable can affect our feelings. It involved two groups of subjects, each receiving alternating drips of water and Kool-Aid into their mouths. For one group, the liquids alternated in a recognizable pattern; for the other, water and Kool-Aid switched off randomly. Based on brain scans made during the study, Berns and his fellow researchers concluded that subjects in the group that experienced the sweeter stuff unpredictably were experiencing greater pleasure, as the uncertain anticipation gave them a dopamine boost. A British firm called Neuroco studied the similar high that shopping can provide more directly, rigging up shoppers with portable brain monitors. “Shopping is enormously rewarding to us,” neuroscientist David Lewis, the firm’s director of research and development, told The Wall Street Journal. A traditional account of how we make decisions about whether to go ahead and buy whatever it is that’s giving us a dopamine rush would have Consumer Economicus weighing the pleasure of purchase now versus other, future uses of that purchase cost for different, utility-maximizing options. Again, behavioral research challenges this scenario. Stanford neuroscientist Brian Knutson and colleagues looked at brain activity of subjects who were asked to make consumption decisions and suggested that what really happens is more of a battle between the pleasure of getting and the “pain of paying.” Another part of the brain, the insula, is activated by anticipation or experiences of something bad or disgusting o painful— including, researchers say, a whoppingly high price tag. As Carnegie Mellon’s George Loewenstein has noted, credit cards are one effective shortcut around the buzz-kill of the insula, letting dopamine rule the day. In the context of Gerald Zaltman’s storytelling theory, rationale thinking can be anoth-
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