NUCLEUS ACCUMBENS - A NEW FOCUS FOR MARKETERS?

11 April 2008

Relationship between pleasure and gambling explored in latest Stanford U trials


The old marketing adage that nothing sells like sex may have been given a new lease of life by a recent brain-scan study project designed to discover what motivates risky financial moves...and the boffins think it may be associated with pleasurable things that trigger impulses in the nucleus accumbens, a V-shaped centre near the base of the brain.

Associated Press reports that scientists involved in the project found that when young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make larger financial gambles than if they were shown scary illustrations like snakes, or neutral subjects such as an office stapler.

The erotic pics lit up the same part of the brain that lights up when financial risks are taken - the nucleus accumbens - leading finance professor Camelia Kuhnen of Northwestern University to conclude: "You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same brain area." Kuhnen conducted the study with a Stanford University psychologist, subsequently reporting their findings in the peer-reviewed journal NeuroReport.

The Stanford study involved 15 heterosexual young men at the famed university, and focused on the sex and money hub, normally associated with pleasurable experiences.

When that hub was activated by the erotic images, the men were far more likely to bet high on a random chance game that would earn them either a dollar or a dime. Each man made more than 50 gambles under brain scans.

Stanford psychologist Brian Knutson, the lead author of the study, says it's all about the power of emotion and arousal influencing our financial decisions. The trigger doesn't necessarily have to be sex - it could be chocolate or a winning lottery ticket.

"It didn't matter if the sexy woman didn't tell you anything about the odds of winning a roulette game," Knutson said. "What really matters is that the sexy woman is having an emotional impact. That bleeds over into your financial decisions."

The link between sex and greed goes back hundreds of thousands of years, to men's evolutionary role as provider or resource gatherer to attract women, said Kevin McCabe, professor of economics, law and neuroscience at George Mason University.

"Risk-taking is a natural way of increasing your relative success, but, of course, there's a downside to it, what we're seeing right now in the economy," quipped McCabe.

One still-to-be-published study at Harvard University found a link between higher testosterone levels and financial risk-taking.

The study conducted at Stanford, funded by the National Institutes of Health, used magnetic resonance imaging technology. It's part of a new but growing field called neuroeconomics that attempts to take the hard-wired science of brain biology and mix it with the softer sciences of psychology and economics to figure out why humans make the financial decisions they do.

An earlier study by the same team found that the brain's reward area lit up at about the same time as risky decision-making..

The erotic pictures experiment was designed to find which was the cause and which was the effect. The answer: Lighting up the reward area, in this case with soft-core pictures, caused the risk-taking, Kuhnen said.

The flip side was that the photos of snakes and spiders shown to participants in the study activated that portion of the brain often associated with pain, fear and anger. And those people were more likely to bet low.

Stanford's Symbiotic Project on Affective Neuroscience: http://psychology.stanford.edu/

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