Neuroscientists predict students’ behavior better than their self reports

June 24, 2010

UCLA neuroscientists have found in an experiment that monitoring activity in the medial prefrontal cortex using fMRI was a more accurate predictor of future behavior than self reports by 20 college students.

“From this region of the brain, we can predict for about three-quarters of the people whether they will increase their use of sunscreen beyond what they say they will do,” said the study’s senior author, Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA professor of psychology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences. “If you just go by what people say they will do, you get fewer than half of the people accurately predicted, and using this brain region, we could do significantly better.”

“A problem with standard focus groups is that people are lousy at reporting what they will actually do,” said lead author Emily Falk, who earned her doctorate in psychology from UCLA this month. “We have not had much to supplement that approach, but in the future it may be possible to create what we are calling ‘neural focus groups.’ Instead of talking with people about what they think they will do, a public health or advertising agency can study their brains and learn what they are really likely to do and how an advertisement would be likely to affect millions of other people as well.”

The study, the first persuasion study in neuroscience to predict behavior change, appears June 23 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

More info: UCLA news