You think you’ve decided what to buy? Actually, your brain is still deciding, even as you put your item in your cart.

You’re standing in the cereal aisle, debating whether to buy a healthy bran product or a sugary chocolate alternative. Your hand hesitates for a moment before you take your final bite. But did you know that in those final seconds, as you reach out, your brain is still weighing the pros and cons, influenced by everything that’s happened since your last meal, the health assessment, the catchy advertising jingle, and the colors of the letters on the box?

OUR researchrecently published in Scientific reportsshows that our brains don’t just think before they act. Even when you’re about to buy a product on a supermarket shelf, your brain is still evaluating whether you’re making the right choice.

Additionally, we found that measuring hand movements provides a precise window into the brain’s ongoing decision evaluation: there’s no need to hook people up to expensive brain scans.

What does this situation teach us about our decision-making? And what does it mean for consumers and the people who market to them?

What Hand Movements Tell Us About Decision Making

There have been debate within neuroscience on whether a person’s decision-making movements can be modified once the brain’s “motor plan” has been established.

Our research revealed not only that movements can be changed after a decision is made – “in flight” – but also that the changes correspond to information received by a person’s senses.

To study how our decisions change over timeWe tracked people’s hand movements as they searched for different options presented in images, for example in response to the question “is this image a face or an object?”

When the choices were easy, their hands moved directly toward the correct option. But when the choices were more difficult, new information caused the brain to change its mind, which was reflected in the trajectory of their hand movements.

When we compared these hand movement trajectories to brain activity recorded using neuroimaging, we found that the timing and amount of evidence from the brain assessment matched the movement pattern.

Simply put, reaching movements are shaped by ongoing thinking and decision making.

By showing that brain patterns correspond to movement trajectories, our research also highlights that large and expensive brain scans are not always necessary to study the brain’s decision-evaluation processes, because movement tracking is much more cost-effective and much easier to test on a large scale.

What does this mean for consumers and marketers?

For consumers, knowing that our brains are constantly reevaluating decisions we might consider “final” can help us be more aware of our choices.

For simple decisions like which cereal to eat for breakfast, the impact can be minimal. Even if you’ve chosen a healthy option in advance, you may be tempted at the last minute by the flashy packaging of a less healthy choice.

But for important long-term decisions like choosing a mortgage, it can have serious consequences.

On the other side of the coin, marketers have long known that many purchasing decisions are made on site.

They use strategies such as attractive packaging and strategic product placement to influence people’s decisions.

New methods for studying how people’s brains process information, right down to the last minute, can help marketers design more effective strategies.

Opportunities for further research

Further research in this area could explore how different types of information, such as environmental cues or memories, affect this ongoing process of evaluating decisions in different groups of people. For example, how do people of different ages process information when making decisions?

Our discovery – that hand movements reflect the inner workings of the brain’s decision-making process – could make future studies cheaper and more efficient.

The ability to refine marketing in this way has implications beyond simply selling products. It can also make strategic public messaging much more effective.

This could include developing a public health campaign on vaping specifically aimed at people under 30, or more effectively targeting messages about pension fund scams to people of retirement age.

Choosing a product is not a simple consequence of a decision already made; it is a highly dynamic process. Being aware of what influences our last-minute decision-making can help us make better choices that will have better results.

This article is republished from The conversation under Creative Commons license. Read more original article.