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Why We
Buy: Weighing Pleasure Vs. Pain
Specific areas in brain seem to weigh pleasure of
buying against the pain of spending
By Miranda Hitti,
WebMD
Medical News |
January 2007 - Attention, shoppers: A
battle between pleasure and pain may be going on in
your brain.
When
people are deciding whether to buy something, their
brain apparently weighs the pleasure of making the
purchase against the pain of spending the money.
That's according to research published in the
January issue of Neuron.
The researchers included psychologist
Brian Knutson, PhD, of Stanford University;
economist George Loewenstein, PhD, of Carnegie
Mellon University; and Drazen Prelec, PhD, of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School
of Management.
Their findings defy an economic
theory that purchasing decisions are a trade-off
between current pleasure (buying something now) and
future pleasure (buying something else later),
Loewenstein tells WebMD.
"We suspected that that's not the way
the brain solves the problem of how much to spend,"
Loewenstein says.
Spend Now or Later
"Suppose you're trying to decide
should you go out to a nice dinner tonight,"
Loewenstein explains. "Do you really know what it is
you're going to be giving up in the future? No. You
don't have a clue."
"And suppose you did know what it was
going to be," Loewenstein continues.
"Suppose it was going to be some tiny
fraction of your child's education or something like
that 20 years from now. That just wouldn't be very
motivating."
So he and his colleagues tested
another theory: that purchasing is a mental
tug-of-war between pleasure and pain.
Speed Shopping
In the experiment, the researchers
gave 26 healthy young adults $20 to spend. But
instead of shopping online or at a mall,
participants made their purchases in a lab while
having their brains scanned with functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI)
During the brain scans, the
researchers showed participants a picture of an item
such as gourmet chocolates, books, DVDs, clothes,
clocks, and cameras.
Within a second or two, the item's
price -- scaled to fit the participants' $20 budget
-- appeared below the picture.
The participants quickly clicked
"yes" or "no" buttons to buy the item or not,
spending a total of four seconds each on 80 items
displayed one by one.
Each participant bought, on average,
23 of the 80 items in the experiment, giving their
opinions on the products and prices right after they
finished the test.
Brain Weighs In
The brain scans showed what
participants' brains were up to as they considered
each item.
When they liked an item, a certain
brain area called the nucleus accumbens was
particularly active.
But if they thought items were
overpriced, another brain area (the insula) became
more active and a third brain area (the mesial
prefrontal cortex) became less active.
"The findings are consistent with the
hypothesis that the brain frames preference as a
potential benefit and price as a potential cost,"
the researchers write.
That is, the brain apparently weighs
how much it likes an item with how hard it will be
on the wallet to buy it.
The brain scans were capable of
predicting whether or not participants would buy an
item, the researchers report.
Feeling the Pain
The researchers speculate that credit
cards, which delay payment, may dull the sense of
financial pain.
Loewenstein says that in his other
research, many people say it is hard for them to
spend money, even when they can afford it and would
benefit from the purchase.
Loewenstein's advice to shoppers:
"Make some executive decisions about what you're
going to spend money on and what you're not going to
spend money on."
As long as you stick by those
decisions, you can spend without conflict,
Loewenstein says.
"I think the key task for consumers
is to make these executive decisions and then not
fret about how much you're spending" as long as your
spending falls in line with your decisions.
You can always revise those
decisions, but "you probably should be thinking
about it carefully if you do," Loewenstein says.
Shopping Centers in the Brain?
"Are there shopping centers in the
brain?" asks neurologist Alain Dagher, MD, in an
editorial in the same issue. Dagher works in Canada
at McGill University's Montreal Neurological
Institute.
"Certain questions remain
unanswered," Dagher writes, noting that "in real
life, purchasing decisions are also the result of
planning, reflection, and deliberation."
The pace of spending during the
experiment may be much faster than how people shop
in the real world.
Also, participants had no
distractions in the lab. They didn't window shop,
clip coupons, or have a cooling-off period before
deciding whether to buy.
Still, Dagher says "human financial
behavior is often seemingly irrational." The brain's
pleasure and pain network may explain questionable
spending choices, he says.
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