Download Cybernetics Guides Galvanometric Testing of Advertising Ethics

Cybernetics Guides Galvanometric Testing of Advertising Ethics
M. Louise RIPLEY
Associate Professor of Marketing, Women’s Studies and Environmental Studies
School of Administrative Studies, Atkinson College, York University
Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Canada
ABSTRACT
This paper proposes utilizing Galvanic Skin Response
(GSR), a measurement popular in advertising research, to
measure a respondent’s level of emotional response to an
advertisement while analyzing an ad using the framework
of Formal Deductive Logic (FDL). The galvanometer, in
recording the respondent’s emotional reaction to the ad,
should show differences between the respondent’s written
evaluation of emotional response (i.e.: the logical
approach) and the actual response, providing an idea of
the error of judgment by the respondent in evaluating
his/her emotional response to the ad. If we can discover
ways of evaluating the difference between how
respondents say they react to the emotional argument in
an ad and how technology says they in fact react, we may
be closer to knowing how the emotional content of ads
may affect people before airing a particular ad.
INTRODUCTION
Most sciences so abhor mistakes that experiments are
often numbered non-sequentially in order that researchers
not become discouraged by failures, and mistakes are
washed down laboratory drains. Cybernetics suggests we
make use of mistakes to learn how to do things better and
thus is an ideal science with which to study management
decisions in the Social Sciences, particularly those about
ethical advertising. Ethics is a relativist issue, depending
upon the standards of conduct and moral judgment of
those making the decision. An ad that offends one
person’s ethics may cause no problem to another.
Marketers nevertheless require some method of
determining if an ad is ethical. Toward that end, they
frequently start with an analysis of the logical arguments
imbedded in the ad, but there are also emotional
arguments in ads, and these are far more difficult to
analyze. This paper proposes utilizing Galvanic Skin
Response (GSR) to try to measure a respondent’s level of
emotional response to an advertisement while working
with an analysis of the ad that uses the framework of
Formal Deductive Logic (syllogism). The galvanometer,
in recording a respondent’s physiological reaction to the
ad, should show any differences between the respondent’s
written evaluation of emotional response (i.e.: a logical
approach) and the actual response (i.e.: the real emotional
response). That difference may be important in analyzing
how people in fact respond to an ad.
GALVANOMETRIC SKIN RESPONSE
The Galvanometric Skin Response is a research method
known as long ago as the end of the nineteenth century
[1]. It was popular with marketing researchers in the
middle of the last century, was brought forward again at
the end of it [2] and is still in use today [3]. In simplest
terms, GSR measures very small changes in the skin’s
perspiration by how it conducts electricity, as an
indication of a person’s emotional response to a stimulus.
In our case this stimulus is an advertisement. The measure
is highly specific and can be used to track a person’s
reaction to precise points in an advertisement where the
person experienced the reaction. Marketing researchers
found it useful because they could track a person’s actual
reaction to an ad instead of having to rely on what the
person later reported they felt as a reaction. It was
regarded as an unbiased measure of arousal in response to
the ad [4].
The method was not without its problems. We may know
the respondent experienced an emotion but if we are
looking for a reaction of, say, excitement, we do not know
if it was fear or some other emotion. The method
nevertheless has good standing in the psychological
literature and is “widely accepted by behavioural
scientists” [5]. What is significant about GSR for the
purpose of testing a respondent’s reaction to an ad with
respect to judging ethics is that this kind of testing avoids
the problem of the respondent’s “rational and cognitive
processes”. It instead measures “an involuntary
physiological response which is emotionally and/or
unconsciously driven” [6]. Ethics is a deeply rooted
phenomenon, often established early in life, subject to
many and various recognized and unrecognized emotions.
It also is an area where people usually wish to appear
“better-behaved” than they might in truth feel or act. It
would therefore be of value to have some measures of
respondents’ reactions, other than those they report.
DIFFICULTIES IN EVALUATING THE ETHICS
OF AN AD
The need for a better way of analyzing respondents’
emotional reactions to advertisements arose out a
realization by some researchers who regularly utilize the
Gilbert Multimodal Argumentation model that while we
“talked the talk” of examining all modes of argument,
when it came to examining emotional arguments, we were
still placing them into the structure of the syllogism used
in Formal Deductive Logic.
Emotion regularly loses out in the analysis of argument.
Traditionally in Western society, we think of argument as
synonymous with logic. We hear it in phrases like, “I’m
not going to argue with you if you can’t be logical”. But
logic is not the only form of argument, nor is it the only
basis on which to examine the ethics of an ad. Michael
Gilbert [7] in introducing his theory of MultiModal
Argumentation maintained that while argumentation
traditionally is associated with logic and reasoning [8, 9,
10, 11, 12], we also must consider three other modes of
argumentation: emotional, visceral, and kisceral, or
intuitive. I focus in this paper only on the additional
aspect of emotional arguments.
Gilbert highlights the frequent erroneous perception that
logical means right and emotional means wrong, and
furthermore suggests, following Plato, that logic and
emotion should never have been separated [13]. Almost
every ad uses both logic and emotion. Most ads will use
some logic to argue their position, with the possible
exception of some of the more exotic perfume ads.
Emotion is used in almost all ads at least to some extent
partly because it breaks down logical counter-arguments
or “unspoken utterances” [14], which the consumer is
most likely to make while reading the ad. Any mode of
argumentation may be right for a particular use. In
analyzing advertisements, What I maintain may be wrong
is the use of a mode of argumentation to make an
unethical argument to sell a product. This is why we need
to be able to examine emotional arguments in advertising.
It is relatively easy to
examine
the
logical
argument in an ad, using
the structures of Formal
Deductive Logic. Working
within the Gilbert model, I
examine logical arguments
in the following manner,
using
examples
from
Ripley [15]. In this
business-to-business ad for
Duo-Pro
containment
piping
made
by
Asahi/America,
for
example, we see white pipe fittings against a blue
background in the top third of the ad, with small bulleted
paragraphs of print filling the lower two thirds of the
page. In analyzing this ad, I begin with the standard
syllogism format:
All M are P.
All S are M.
_____________
Therefore, all S are P.
We can easily fit Duo Pro’s argument into that same
structure:
All pipes that meet safety standards (M)
are things that are worth buying
(P).
All Duo-Pro pipes (S) are pipes that
meet (& exceed) safety standards (M).
_____________________________
Therefore, all Duo-Pro pipes (S) are
things that are worth buying (P).
This ad is straightforward, using clear unambiguous logic
to make its argument, and with little if any emotion
involved. The use of the logical structure shows us we
most likely have a true conclusion.
An advertisement can also
be straightforward and
mainly emotional, but it is
not as easy to examine
emotional arguments. This
ad for the Mount Sinai
Medical Centre in New
York City shows a blackand-white photograph of an
ordinary woman holding a
copy of the New York
Times as she smiles out at
us. The large writing says,
“Yesterday
She
Was
Blind.” The copy goes on
to tell us that, using laser
surgery, the doctors at the
medical centre were able to restore her sight. The ad
appeals to our logic in some way, as almost every ad will.
The copy tells the woman’s story and links the recovery
of her sight directly to the medical centre’s 135 years of
experience, but the main thrust of the ad is emotional.
There are, however, no “laws” of emotional
argumentation as there are for logic. The best we can say
is that the emotion appealed to in this ad is appropriate to
the product advertised, and the ad does not distort facts to
increase emotion.
When working with highly emotional and misleading ads,
however, especially if one is going to suggest they may be
unethical, we need a way to analyze them more carefully.
Take, for example, this
exceedingly emotional ad
for women’s running shoes.
Ryka’s ad shows running
shoes, a woman exercising,
another with a tear running
down her face, and in the
centre, a pink rose, with
copy reading, “Sometimes
the only way to work it out,
is to work it out. When you
buy a pair, Ryka will
commit seven percent of its
profits to the Ryka ROSE Foundation (Regaining One’s
Self-Esteem) to fund community-action programmes to
end violence against women.” This ad utilizes the issue of
violence against women to sell shoes. To critique it and
evaluate whether it violates some ethical standard, it will
not be sufficient to say, “it does not appear appropriate”
or, “the ad distorts facts”. Therefore I turned to the
method of analysis used for logic, the syllogism, claiming
the overt and logical syllogism is:
All firms that donate to a worthy cause
are firms that deserve your
business.
Ryka is a firm that donates to a worthy
cause.
fairly evaluating an emotional argument if we use the
structure of logical argument (the syllogism) to facilitate
its analysis. Indeed, Elkyam [19] questioned whether it
was fair to “analyze” emotional arguments at all, as he
argued, with a silent visual presentation of pictures taken
during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the
incompetence of the American government’s handling of
that natural disaster.
USING GSR TO TEST EMOTIONAL REACTION
TO QUESTIONABLY ETHICAL ADS
Galvanic Skin Response works by measuring the
“electrical activity that is produced by the activity of the
eccrine (sweat) glands that are widely distributed
throughout the skin and are regulated by the autonomic
nervous
subsystems,
the
sympathetic
and
parasympathetic” [20]. GSR is considered by market
researchers to be the best measure of psychological events
occurring in the brain of the consumer, particularly
because it measures things over which the respondent has
no control. It reports on the amount of response to stimuli
the respondent is experiencing, whether or not s/he is
aware of it. Particularly important for use with issues of
ethics, the GSR method can “bypass the mind’s ‘cognitive
rationalizer’ and circumvent false or inaccurate reports”
from consumers [21]. This avoids the problem of
consumers saying what they think will make them sound
like better citizens when being asked about ethics, or
saying what they believe the researcher is looking for.
_____________________________
Therefore Ryka is a firm that deserves
your business.
Beneath this, however, I unearthed a covert emotional
argument, still in the form of a syllogism:
All cases of pain in the world can be
solved by buying a product.
Violence against women is a case of
pain.
_____________________________
Therefore violence against women can
be solved by buying a product
(preferably ours).
With this format, we can begin to analyze the emotional
argument: to question the truth of the premises, to explore
its soundness and validity, to verify whether we have a
true conclusion. But is it fair to analyze an emotional
argument in this way? This is the question that has
haunted the author and others [16, 17, 18]: whether we are
GSR has not been widely used in marketing research,
despite high praise by its relatively few users. This has
been attributed to the kind of “black box” nature of its
analysis, whereby we purport to measure what goes on
inside the heads of respondents. This, however, will be
true of almost any measure purporting to tell us what is
happening inside respondents’ heads. There are more
serious faults, and ones that will have to be accounted for
in using GSR for the purposes proposed in this paper.
These include using general equipment not specifically
designed or accurate enough for one’s purpose, using it in
physical areas where there are too many distractions for
the respondent, use by people not trained in its operation,
and not knowing well enough how to calibrate results. All
these problems can be overcome by hiring a reputable
firm to do the GSR testing instead of just buying a
galvanometer and trying to learn to be an expert oneself,
as was done in many of the studies in the mid to late
1900s. One also needs to carefully and thoroughly explain
to the expert hired the exact, proposed parameters and
details of one’s study.
The first step would be to pretest the methodology by
testing respondents’ reactions to a series of ads, some of
which were prejudged with other methods (perhaps just
judgment) to be either predominantly logical or
predominantly emotional. This would involve, as it
typically does with the GSR, attaching sensors to the
respondents’ fingertips and showing a series of
advertisements. The GSR apparatus records respondents’
emotional reactions to the ads, not only in general, but
second-by-second to each part of each ad. This enables a
fine level of analysis of where respondents reacted in each
ad. We would also have respondents put in writing, after
the GSR tests, a statement about their emotional reaction
to each of the ads, for comparison with the GSR results.
Then I envision a more difficult test. I do not have the
space in this preliminary paper to fully explore the precise
use of the galvanometer for this part, much less to test and
report on results, but I wish to outline some ideas and
seek feedback from those attending the workshop. In this
exercise a respondent, hooked up to the GSR apparatus,
would perform the same kind of formal written syllogistic
analysis I have shown here, on two ads, one a
predetermined “logical” ad and one a predetermined
“emotional” ad. We would test to see if the respondent
records a greater emotional response while working with
the “emotional” ad. Following up by asking the
respondents to put in writing, after the GSR tests, a
statement about their emotional reaction to each of the
ads, for comparison with the GSR results, we would seek
to know whether there were major differences in how the
respondents described their emotional reactions to an
“emotional” ad and how the GSR described their
emotions.
There is some concern with GSR that it does not enable
the researcher to know whether the respondent’s reaction
is positive or negative. For us, however, this does not
matter; we are looking for an emotional reaction, which
is, psychological theory tells us, indicated by a
physiological reaction in the sweat glands in the
fingertips. We would expect to see a much higher reaction
to ads we have labelled “emotional” than to those we have
labelled “logical”. My hope would be that we would find
this in the first level of testing. We also would expect to
see higher levels of emotion scored on the GSR even
while performing a logical analysis of an emotional ad,
higher than when working on the logical analysis of a
“logical” ad.
CONCLUSION
GSR remains a viable research technique. The decline of
its use in marketing research has been documented [22]
and the reasons for the decline in its use in that field have
mainly to do with poor research methodology, little of
which should affect what is proposed here. I believe
testing respondents’ actual emotional reactions to ads they
are working with in respect to ethics, may help us better
understand how to analyze the emotions contained in an
advertisement, and thereby bring us a little closer to
understanding the issue of what makes an ad ethical.
FUTURE RESEARCH
Future research clearly includes performing the research
that is only proposed here. Then we would need further
research in making the leap from discovering through
GSR that respondents do have an emotional response to
an ad which perhaps they claimed in writing had not
moved them emotionally, to deciding that this fact is
linked to an ethical issue.
One further area to be investigated, although not in the
research agenda of this researcher, is the interesting
problem of when an emotionally powerful ad scores high
with respondents, either positively or negatively, either as
strongly ethical or not ethical, but in-store results show it
has no effect, or worse, a negative effect on sales.
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