Gene, Brain and Social Behaviour
Craving pudding pops
Emotions are important. Cognitive ability can lead you to water, but it’s your emotions that will urge you to drink. Advertisers have known this for a long time. They know it is better to sell you the sizzle rather than the steak because they know it’s better to reach you on an emotional level than on a logical one. This fact is the reason that many advertisers choose to use celebrity spokespeople.
There’s a classic advertising joke that says to throw in a celebrity if you don’t have a clear messaging strategy. As funny as this may sound, there is indeed some supporting science behind it. There have been findings in the field of neuroscience that state that emotions play an important role in forming memories. Furthermore, it has been found that if a person who endorses a product in an advertisement is considered an expert, viewers would better remember the product endorsed. Thus, it is not difficult to extrapolate that by using a celebrity expert, an advertiser can essentially leverage pre-existing feelings for a celebrity to help form favourable memories of a product. While this is good information for your next Trivial Pursuit night, the role of emotions in decision-making goes much further than this.
Doing the right thing
When faced with a situation that involves making a choice dealing with morals, emotions play an important part in the decision-making process. Feelings of satisfaction have been tied to actions related to fairness, while feelings of disgust have been associated with actions related to moral violation. These feelings act as sign posts or reminders that help steer our actions towards moral behaviours and away from immoral ones. Interestingly, it has been found in subjects with damage to their brain in the areas that modulate emotion, that these subjects are more likely to choose simply utilitarian options and ignore the impact of such choices on others. This may have some interesting implications for the business world. The world of business often prefers cold thinking over emotional reactions. Is it possible that businesses are inheritably immoral because their decisions are constantly encouraged to be made without regard to emotion? The Enron situation and the recent real-estate bubble might be evidence of this. Of course this is pure speculation.
In any case, if emotions are so important because they affect the decisions we make, then what, if anything, affects how our emotions surface in the first place? The answer to this isn’t so clear-cut. There is a school of thought that says that our personalities are the products of our genes, others say that they are influenced by our environment, while others claim that both play a role.
“Tonight’s draw is for one million dollars”
When I was younger, my grandparents lived with my family. One of our routines was to stay up late on Saturday nights and wait for the 6/49 results to be broadcasted. As far as I know, the numbers they picked never changed, the numbered balls were always dropped into the rotating drum in the same sequence, and the numbers were always drawn approximately the way every week. Yet, despite all the relatively constant variables, the lottery consistently failed at making us rich. While these moments seem like a lifetime away, I can’t help but think back to them as I ponder about the influences of what makes me who I am and what makes me make the decisions I take.
It would be a hard to try to convince me that my genetics map out my personality in its entirety. I definitely have traits that neither my mother nor father had. I love working in an industry that didn’t even exist when I was conceived. So how can genetics explain this? On the other hand, I grew up with my uncle in very similar environments, but we’re night and day in terms of our tastes. The way I see it, if 49 balls can’t be counted on to consistently produce the same results week after week, should it really come as any surprise that identical twins don’t grow up to be exact in every way? Despite each ball having similar “genetics” and environment, they each will follow their own path in the big spinning barrel.
It’s not the destination that counts, it’s the journey
In the end, the debate between nature and nurture is meaningless because those were never the only two players in the mix in the first place. In the case of the lottery balls, a myriad of random variables affect the outcome such as air movement, friction, temperature and plain old luck. In the case of identical twins, though they both may have virtually identical personality potential, how each twin’s personality actually develops will undoubtedly have distinct nuances that will differentiate the two. For example, while they both may have a knack for public speaking, but one may react poorly to uncertainty while the other may feel emboldened by opportunity. So while looking into one’s genomes and environment can give us a good hunch on how we’ll turn out, life is simply to overwhelmingly random to consistently predict every facet of one’s personality.
But let us assume that it was possible to know exactly how people would react to certain stimulus and that it was possible to get the perfect message to the right people in a cost effective way. Would this be moral even if was for the best intensions? Doing so would be risky at best because, in general, society puts a lot of value into the freedom of choice and thought.
And the bonus number is…
If everything was laid out from the onset, would life still be worth living? If it was known that all celebrity endorsements would cause viewers make a purchase, would anyone still watch commercials? If one knew that he would die from a certain disease when he reached 80, would he stop enjoying certain foods? Undoubtedly, there will be marketers looking to leverage the latest findings of neuroscience as there will be definitely a great deal of money to be made by doing so regardless of the moral implications. But in terms of knowing one’s self and one’s own future, in my opinion, certain things should be just left simply to chance. Sometimes you just have to let the chips lie where they may because it makes the lottery called life so much more entertaining and worth experiencing.
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