[Off-Topic] People: Rational Animals? The id and ego in marketing

First published on 2013-05-16T17:54:01+00:00

On different levels, we consider ourselves “rational animals.” We understand our ability to reason as the characteristic that separates us from other animals.

In this world of startups, we spend our days trying to answer a hard question: “How do I demonstrate the value of my product to the world?” Is it the cheapest? The easiest to use? The most elegant?

To get to the root of the problem, it helps to go back a few centuries and then move forward to what we know today about how we reason.

"I think, therefore I am"

Almost everyone has heard and repeated this phrase at some point in life, usually with dubious interpretations, but few stop to reflect on what it means. The phrase is by the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, a man who doubted and questioned everything, including his own senses, since they had fooled us countless times. At the very least, the act of questioning, of thinking, defines the only certainty we can have: that we exist.

The name Descartes, in Latin, is “Cartesius,” from which the word “Cartesian” comes. It names Descartes’ philosophy, the “Cartesian Dualism”, the complete separation between mind and body. The idea is that “the intangible soul exists despite the material body.” It’s the entry of mathematical thought into philosophy, with the proposal that all possible knowledge can be deduced purely through reasoning, regardless of the body, the senses, and the emotions.

Let’s jump from the 17th century to the 19th and meet another name: Phineas Gage, a US construction worker still remembered today for an unusual episode. An explosion at a railroad work site launched a huge iron rod, about 3 cm in diameter and weighing 6 kg, which entered under his left jaw, passed behind his left eye, pierced his brain, and exited through the top, leaving a hole in the top of his skull.

The force of the explosion threw the rod 25 meters away. Gage stayed conscious, even while literally leaking brain from the hole.

What makes the case interesting is that Phineas survived and lived another twelve years. According to reports from the time, though, the person before the accident and the one after were completely different.

Those reports aren’t reliable, but they describe the Gage before the accident as “balanced, meticulous, and persistent about his goals, besides being a responsible and skilled professional.” After the accident his personality changed, “he was belligerent, ill-tempered, lazy, and irresponsible. He became impatient and stubborn, using coarse language he had never used before.”

"Phineas was no longer Phineas."

This episode can be considered the catalyst for modern neuroscience and its effects on psychology, sociology, and even behavioral economics. The Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio uses this case in his famous book “Descartes’ Error”.

"I feel, therefore I am."

Modern neuroscience has already knocked down the old Cartesian notion of separation between mind and body. Today we know that the body influences the mind. For the purpose of this explanation, let’s simplify our emotions as the expression of the physiological state of the body and brain, affected by stimuli. Anyone who has used legal or illegal drugs, Prozac, Zoloft, LSD, or who went through hormonal anomalies, knows the devastating effect this has on their own definition of “SELF.”

Damasio’s hypothesis is that the region damaged in Phineas was the left prefrontal cortex. This is one of the foundations of the “Somatic Markers Hypothesis”, which proposes that our decision-making, far from being purely rational and Cartesian, is guided by emotions.

Research on several people who, like Phineas, suffered damage to the neocortex region shows problems with decision-making and social conduct. They have difficulty planning for the long term, learning from their own mistakes, and behaving in a socially acceptable way.

"A man always has two reasons to do anything: the good reason and the real reason."

This article was born when I stopped to reflect on this phrase, commonly attributed to the finance giant who helped constitute General Electric, John Pierpont Morgan, better known as J.P. Morgan.

Back to the world of biology, nothing and nobody designed us the way we are. We are the most recent result of constant mutations and survival tests in the environment, over millions of years. We are at the top of that chain, Homo Sapiens, and, thanks to thinkers like Descartes, we define ourselves as “rational animals.”

Indeed, one of our most striking characteristics is having a brain equipped with a prefrontal cortex (PFC), which gives us cognitive skills, personality, expression, decision-making capacity, and the moderation of social behavior.

But our brain is the result of evolution, and the PFC is only the most recent episode. According to the triune brain theory, the second oldest part is what we know as the limbic system, the source of emotions, along with the proto-reptilian brain.

A characteristic present in the brains of all animals, from invertebrates up to us, is the instantaneous mechanisms we can summarize as “emotions.” Joy, sadness, fear, courage, pleasure.

It’s a good thing we have emotions like fear, because that’s what makes us react even before reasoning about it. It can be the millisecond of reaction that makes you dodge the car you didn’t consciously notice but that would have killed you. The same millisecond that keeps your hand from getting too close to the mouth of an animal about to bite.

Technically, emotion and instinct aren’t the same thing, but emotion carries that instinctive component.

The important point, and the theory behind Somatic Markers, is that the emotional reaction comes first and only then comes the rational reaction, which takes longer to process. That order matters. Using a metaphor borrowed from Freud’s psychology, we can equate the emotional brain with the “Id” and the rational brain, the PFC, with the “Ego.”

The order we’re used to says that, at least in our slower, more “pondered” decisions, we can “turn off” the Id almost completely and use only the Ego’s cognition. We run cost-benefit analyses, weigh the facts impartially, and make the best possible decision.

What neuroscience shows is that the opposite may be happening. First your Id has already made a decision (“I want that!”) and then your Ego rationalizes and tries to justify that decision (“I want it because of reason X.”). Some people call this “gut feeling,” intuition, a visceral emotional reaction.

That is, the “real reason” comes first, the emotional reaction. Then you justify and express it with the “good reason,” the rational reaction.

This matters because we don’t think in that sequence. Without being rigorous, look at what’s known as the “Marketing Mix,” the 4 Ps of Marketing: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place. In the 1960s, Jerome McCarthy coined the term and Philip Kotler turned it into dogma in his magnum opus, the Principles of Marketing. The 4 Ps already grew into 7 Ps, then 4 Cs, 4 Es, and they keep spawning derivations.

Looking at it from the surface, most of us are conditioned to rationalize: comparing technical specs, trying to justify one product as superior to another because of price, technical features, availability. When we think about how to present our product or service and how to differentiate it, the focus is usually on making it “better,” “faster,” “cheaper,” all rational justifications we imagine will most influence the other “rational animals” like us.

The role of Marketing starts before justifying the product or pleasing the Ego. The primary thing is to provoke the Id first, to create the visceral emotional reaction. The objective features still count, and they become tools for the Ego to use when justifying the choice. But the choice will already be made. That’s the beauty of the theory.

You can justify as much as you want how many goals your team scored this championship, how many titles it won through history, the lineup. All of that is your ventromedial prefrontal cortex trying to rationalize the emotional choice the limbic system has already made. If you love football, no amount of rationalization will make you switch your “heart team.”

You can’t adjust the levels of noradrenaline, serotonin, and dopamine directly, injecting chemicals into people to move their emotions (only psychiatrists can do that legally). But you can affect these reactions through other channels. Human beings have five senses that serve as an interface. Any advertising campaign that features children, for example, wants to manipulate your limbic system into the first emotional reaction before you stop to rationalize.

So far we’ve only scratched the surface of what fields like medicine, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, and economics have been researching in recent decades. The intention is just to show that these fields exist, that knowledge about human behavior evolves all the time, and that you can draw many new perspectives from it to use in the real world.