Neuroleadership applies the disciplines of neuroscience, in particular neuroeconomics, to management research and management philosophy.

Neuroeconomics has gained traction in the past 10 years, exploring the brain processes that underlie decision-making. This new field looks at how economic decision-making actually occurs inside the brain. Insights are bridging the work of neuroscience, psychology and economics. In many instances, these three disciplines study the same phenomena: decision making, value-based judgment, and heuristics.

Spin offs into specific areas of business include neuromarketing – which uses brain-tracking tools to determine why consumers prefer some products over others.

Effectively, each of these is integrating insights from social psychology, neuroscience, and business.
There is good evidence that our minds work entirely differently when dealing with people as opposed to objects. For example, we have to monitor people more than ‘things’.  People have to be connected with, remembered and understood. People need relationships, things do not.

The Tipping Point of Animacy

As humans, we need to consider how, when and where we perceive life. Studies of images of humans morphing into inanimate versions have shown that humans are hypersensitive as to what makes something look alive. Animacy is a humanistic trait needed to establish any sense of empathy with various facial expressions perceived. If we are to proceed down the pathway of developing humanoids, how will humans reacts when such ‘machines’ are indistinguishable from evolved humans? Will they be accepting, or will they feel more comfortable when it is obvious that a machine is a machine? This will be important if cyborgs are to be used in the workplace.

There was also a distinct difference in animacy perceptions to different regions of the face. Images of nose and skim were relatively low. Mouths scored slightly higher, but it was the eyes that more readily distinguished human from non-human images. Could it be that the eyes are truly the window to the soul, and is not something that machines can ever replicate. And what happens when we start enhancing sight with biotechnology? Will we lose this sensitivity and become more accepting, more connected with the soulless eyes of humanoids?

As the researchers wrote:

“eyes convey a wealth of information, from attention to emotion and intent”.

Different parts of the brain prioritise different things – one part focuses more on facial expression, others parts on whether something is alive or not, and another on groupings or relationships of a person to other people or things, a contextual relevance. Much of this prioritisation occurs in response to the reptilian brain driving perception in others parts of the brain as it attempts to establish whether its owners body is in danger or not. It also conveys an underlying intrinsic motivation for humans to connect with others.

For marketers, the belief that viewers are more attracted to ads portraying people may be not entirely correct. Ongoing research is being conducted to determine whether humans more likely to retain and remember information paired with a picture of a human face. It might be that the human face is distracting, so you remember the face but not the ad copy; or alternatively, seeing a human face may connect to advanced cognitive mechanisms of the brain, enabling us to encode things more readily because they’re paired with a face.

And to prove that more of a good thing is not always better, the study is also looking at whether our brain gets overloaded in the presence of too many faces; and does this drain energy and focus. This may hold significance in office planning and event participation.