The Neuroscience Research Methods in Management

Abstract

Enormous progress in understanding fundamental brain processes by using neuroscientific methods underlying management, marketing and consumers’ choice has been appeared. All thoughts and ideas of people are constituted by neural circuits. However, people have only limited conscious access to these neural circuits. As a result, an estimated 2% of thoughts are conscious, and the weakness of traditional research methods, such as surveys and focus group interviews, is that they concentrate mainly for people’s conscious part of mind. On the contrary, the main benefit by using neuroscientific methods is that there are many possibilities to uncover the unconscious brain processes, which are critical for human choice in management contexts.

The chapter divides neuroscientific methods for biometrics and neuroimaging. The main biometrics methods include eye tracking, face reading, skin conductance, and heart rate measurements. The main neuroimaging methods include electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The description of each method will be presented with examples in management and marketing contexts. The analysis of each method includes benefits and drawbacks in these contexts. And finally, the description how much each method can predict the human behaviour in the real context will be presented. This chapter introduces neuroscientific methods at an elementary level to the management science community. It gives basic concepts and ideas on how to apply neuroscience in order to solve scientific and practical management problems by using neuroscientific methods.