Making social neuroscience less WEIRD: Using fNIRS to measure neural signatures of persuasive influence in a Middle East participant sample.

Abstract

The large majority of social neuroscience research uses WEIRD populations—participants from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic locations. This makes it difficult to claim whether neuropsychological functions are universal or culture specific. In this study, we demonstrate one approach to addressing the imbalance by using portable neuroscience equipment in a study of persuasion conducted in Jordan with an Arabic-speaking sample. Participants were shown persuasive videos on various health and safety topics while their brain activity was measured using functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Self-reported persuasiveness ratings for each video were then recorded. Consistent with previous research conducted with American subjects, this work found that activity in the dorsomedial and ventromedial prefrontal cortex predicted how persuasive participants found the videos and how much they intended to engage in the messages’ endorsed behaviors. Further, activity in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex was associated with persuasiveness ratings, but only in participants for whom the message was personally relevant. Implications for these results on the understanding of the brain basis of persuasion and on future directions for neuroimaging in diverse populations are discussed.

Consumer Neuroscience Techniques in Advertising Research: A Bibliometric Citation Analysis

“…Their results showed that the GFS index could be used as an index for identifying emotional arousal modifications during video watching. Several studies using fNIRS evaluated preference in advertising settings and concluded that orbitofrontal cortices are engaged in emotional and preferred commercials [25,39].…”

Assessment and Feedback in Higher Education

“…Another barrier to research is the considerable cost of equipment and laboratories. Burns et al (2019) report on a neuroscience study that overcame this problem by using portable equipment to study persuasion in Jordan with an Arabspeaking sample. While Muthukrishna et al (2018), in an effort to make the literature less WEIRD, produced a cultural distance scale to identify societies that could usefully be compared.…”

Computational methods in social neuroscience: recent advances, new tools and future directions

“…fNIRS is a particularly promising method for studying social interactions in contexts that bear a strong resemblance to everyday life, given that participants can move, express themselves and interact relatively freely, allowing for more natural behavior. Moreover, fNIRS equipment is often quite portable, affording the ability to collect data in a greater diversity of settings than most other neuroimaging modalities would allow ( Burns et al. , 2019 ; Burns and Lieberman, 2019 ).…”