Consumer Neuroscience and Consumer Behaviour

Dear Colleagues,

Neuroscience tools and expertise have been utilised by various disciplines, and new labels, such as Neuromarketing, Neuroeconomics and NeuroIS (Neuro Information Systems), have been created. From a context perspective, this makes perfect sense, given that all human behaviour is produced by the brain and that the brain consists of neurons that perform decision making and behaviour production. The crucial benefit of objective neuro-measures when compared to sole survey-based investigations relates to two important aspects. First, humans are rarely aware of most of their decisions they make every day. Instead, their behaviour is largely driven by non-conscious processes. Thus, if being asked about why any particular decision has been made, one can actually only speculate. However, answers are provided and business decisions are made accordingly. Second, both cognitive and affective processing happen simultaneously, but affective aspects of any stimuli form the very basis of decision making. This triggered the well-known acceptance of irrational decision making playing quite a role. Through the field of Neuroeconomics it has been understood that a pure homo economicus does not exist, instead, decisions are at least, at times, clearly irrational. Crucially, language does not have access to the deeply subcortical level of affective information processing, which is again a strong limitation factor of survey-based investigations and makes neuroscience tools inevitable.

Despite a growing number of studies that demonstrate and highlight existing discrepancies between explicit (subjective data; always conscious) and implicit (objective data due to utilising neuroscience tools; mostly non-conscious) responses, those are still widely ignored and their potential largely neglected. Within a business, organisational and economic context this Special Issue is meant to raise respective awareness, to close the gap and to provide both scholars and industries with a well selected collection of theoretical and empirical work that shows how different study outcomes can look like depending on whether physiological data (objective body data) or explicit responses were sampled. For any administrative aspects it holds that the brain knows more than it admits to our consciousness and we certainly want to get access to that knowledge. This allows us to compare explicit and implicit responses and finally to better understand and predict human behaviour.

Thus, do not hesitate to submit your opinion, perspective, review or full article on the above-mentioned topic to the journal Administrative Sciences. I am sure it will be highly recognised and well cited, because the topic is of enormous interest to businesses, and for all organisational and economic purposes.

Prof. Dr. Peter Walla
Guest Editor

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• non-conscious mind
• affective and cognitive processing
• neuroconsulting
• brain imaging
• objective and subjective measures
• body data
• implicit and explicit responses