There’s a schmaltzy scene in the movie Superman, between Superman (Christopher Reeve) and Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) called The Flying Scene.  Superman takes Lois on a nighttime flight above Metropolis.  The John Williams song Can You Read My Mind plays in the background with full orchestration as Lois falls into a trance memorized by the super hero.  As the romantic evening ends, a bedazzled Lois mutters to herself: “What a super man,” and thus is inspired to dub him “Superman” in her next newspaper story.  Here’s the clip from the movie.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece on neuroscience within marketing and research.  In other words, reading someone’s mind.  The question was, is it ethical?  I’m amazed at the number of people who wrote me, or posted on my TruthOut.org piece saying they think neuromarketing is totally ethical or think it’s much a do about nothing; that researches can’t accurately read our minds with any accuracy.

Well this past week National Public Radio ran a series on neuroscience.  The focus was on the research that is taking place to identify if someone is telling the truth or lying, and if a person is predisposed to certain psychological pathologies.  There was also a troubling story about a convicted rapist and murderer from Chicago who is using neuroresearch to attempt to avoid the death penalty, by claiming he couldn’t help himself; that his brain is wired a certain way and he can’t resist his criminal behavior.

And then there was a story about James Fallon, a neuroscientist from the University of California-Irvine who has studied the brains of psychopaths for nearly 20 years trying to figure out how a killer’s brain differs from yours and mine.  Fallon claims there are patters which can be identified via brain scans which identify higher or lower predisposition to pathological behaviors.  He even claims he himself has that predisposition and found out he comes from a lineage of criminals, including Lizzie Broden  Now that doesn’t mean he’s about to take an axe and give his mother 40 whacks.  But it does raise ethical issues.  So what does this have to do with marketing and market research?

A great deal.

Think about this.  If we can figure out the likelihood of being a criminal, then figuring out if a red box or blue box will cause a preference or not for sugared water, malt beverages or junk food is a chip shot.  Remember, in research we’re looking for tendencies and preferences.

Supposed you showed 100 people a red box and blue box and asked them which product they would buy and there was a preference for the red box.  I think we’d all say that is OK.  But let’s say you put the same 100 people through an MRI and found there is actually a greater preference, not for the red box, but for the blue box since certain parts of the brain light up, and that the panel of people themselves didn’t even realize this unconscious preference.  Is that ethical usage of research?

What if you were in Las Vegas and the house knew through neuromarketing research, that gamblers had a preference for machines that went bing versus bong and they gambled more.  Yet you did not know about this general preference that people, perhaps even you, were unconsciously influenced by this.  Would you be comfortable with that?  Would you think that was ethical?

Oh, and by the way, if you found out during the MRIs that a few of the panel members brains resembled a criminal, would you tell the person or tell the police?

Reading someone’s mind sounds interesting in a romantic setting on the silver screen.  But in real life it’s more so something Lex Luthor would do and not Superman.