Neuromarketing Defined

Neuromarketing: the study of how and why people make choices:

I think that the marketing industry has been slow to adopt neuroscience as a method is two-fold; the first one being that some of technology being used is sometimes expensive and difficult to understand, and with little track record of success.  Being a marketer I like results I can predict.  Also, the fact that neuroscience was a traditionally biological and scientific study; it has a hard time being accepted.

The research experiment I chose was entitled Prosocial video games reduce aggressive cognition, and set out to prove that prosocial video games can influence people to act as better citizens (Greitemeyer & Osswald, 2009, p. 3). Researchers Tobias Greitemeyer and Sylvia Osswald assigned college students to play one of two video games, one a neutral control game, Tetris, the other a prosocial game called Lemmings.  The subjects were measured as having being affected in their observed behavior as becoming more prosocial or less.  

This was done by having the subjects answer questions about their experience, the game and themselves to see if their answers were more prosocial than those exposed to the neutral game.  The results concluded that there was a correlation between those that played the prosocial game and those that offered to help the interrupted experimenter (Greitemeyer & Osswald, 2009, p. 8).

Some issues or limitations of the study are that they scored the answers to the questions on known scales, provided external validity to the test results.  Also, the strength of the operational definition of what it meant to be described a more prosocial, I find, to be solid, and not to abstract as to dilute the results.  While issues regarding the differences in the sex where raised, the researchers did not find enough data to change their findings.  

References:

Cozby, P. C., & Bates, S. C. (2011). Methods in behavioral research (11th ed.). New York, NY: Mcgraw Hill Higher Ed.

Greitemeyer, T., & Osswald, S. (2009). Prosocial video games reduce aggressive cognition. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(4), 896-900. Retrieved from http://peer.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/68/77/25/PDF/PEER_stage2_10.1016%252Fj.jesp.2009.04.005.pdf