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Topoi in Neuromarketing Ethics

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Ethics and Neuromarketing

Abstract

Neuromarketing is one of those emerging fields that promise a lot, but are also surrounded in controversy. It promises to offer a privileged access to the most intimate emotions and unconscious thoughts, which should serve as an undisputed background for effective marketing practices. It promises to be successful where traditional market research techniques and tools failed. But this does not come cheap: a lot of public figures, philosophers and neuroscientists expressed multiple concerns regarding the ethical and legal implications of the neuromarketing research and applications. The aim of this study is to map these ethical concerns and provide a series of elements which can help both researchers and practitioners clarify the ethical limits of their work. The chapter contains two major sections and some brief closing remarks. The first one contains two major distinctions which will serve as basis for the entire ethical discussion in the next section: neuromarketing as both a field of research and applications and neuromarketing ethics as research ethics and as ethics of brain research. The second section is dedicated to a quasi-comprehensive presentation of the ethical challenges of neuromarketing. These topoi are divided in three categories: ethics of neuromarketing research (overclaiming; research conduct—informed consent, protection of vulnerable research participants, paying participants; data practices—research design and scientific validity, confidentiality, research dual use; publication practices—authorship, cherry-picking and salami-slicing, research transparency); ethics of neuromarketing technologies (no harm; privacy; incidental findings); and ethics of neuromarketing applications (manipulative and deceptive marketing practices; exacerbating the emotional factor).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    He is the first researcher whose work in what we now call neuromarketing was featured in mass media. In 1991, BBC TV’s Tomorrow’s World covered extensively Dr. Lewis’ technology called MindScan, a basic EEG device, and his “Index of Cortical Arousal”, an interpretation matrix.

  2. 2.

    A press release from June 3, 2002, announced that BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences, an advertising company from Atlanta, USA, “made a giant step in the Neuromarketing industry by identifying sections of the brain that respond to preferences” (“Brighthouse Institute for Thought Sciences …” 2002).

  3. 3.

    The barrier between the physical processes in the brain and what we call thinking, thoughts, ideas, preferences and so on—mental processes—is still the main problem of any neuroscience investigation. Stating, without any reasonable doubt, that x activations of the brain represent the t thought is nonsensical because it implies that we can establish a direct link between those two elements, which so far neurosciences were unable to do. We are still in the guessing business, where, based on previous localised experiments, we eliminate certain functions and infer that the remaining activations represent what we were looking for (an emotion, a thought, a word, etc.). It will also mean that we can discriminate among the myriad of functions we assign to specific brain regions.

  4. 4.

    In many countries, the funding programmes have specific regulations for research conducted on human and animal subjects. The USA and Europe are pioneers in this respect.

  5. 5.

    The notable exception is France, where Law no. 2011-814 of July 7, 2011, title VII (“Neuroscience and Neuroimaging”), introduced in the bioethics national regulation a new article, no. 16-14, which makes legal only those neuroimaging techniques that serve a medical, scientific or judiciary purpose. Commercial use of neuroimaging is not explicitly banned, but it is excluded by the previous legal phrasing.

  6. 6.

    For example, in the USA: the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects (the so-called Common Rule or HHS 45 CFR part 46); Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues 2011. In Europe: Oviedo Convention from 1997 (Council of Europe 1997), the European Textbook on Ethics in Research (European Commission 2010), and all the local and institutional regulations concerning ethics in research.

  7. 7.

    Declaration of Helsinki, paragraphs 9 and 17; Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences 2002.

  8. 8.

    For further details, see the survey conducted by USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future and Bovitz Inc. on online privacy among millennials: http://annenberg.usc.edu/news/around-usc-annenberg/online-privacy-over-findings-usc-annenberg-center-digital-future-show.

  9. 9.

    Illes et al. (2002) were mentioning that when she and her colleagues were writing their paper there was no “systematic analysis of incidental findings in research EEG, MEG, PET, or SPECT”. Meanwhile, this hasn’t changed. I didn’t manage to find any study approaching incidental findings in brain imaging, though there are studies related to incidental findings in the use of PET and SPECT on other areas of the human body (e.g. lungs for lung cancer studies).

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  1. Centre for Advanced Research in Management and Applied Ethics, București, Romania

    Cristian Ducu

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Akron, Broadview Heights, Ohio, USA

    Andrew R. Thomas

  2. Faculty of Marketing, The Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania

    Nicolae Alexandru Pop

  3. Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania

    Ana Maria Iorga

  4. Centre for Advanced Research in Management and Applied Ethics, Bucharest, Romania

    Cristian Ducu

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Ducu, C. (2017). Topoi in Neuromarketing Ethics. In: Thomas, A., Pop, N., Iorga, A., Ducu, C. (eds) Ethics and Neuromarketing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45609-6_3

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