Abstract:

Consumer neuroscience research often employs small samples, and questions are frequently raised as to whether resulting inferences are reliable and relevant to real world behaviour. Here we share extensive findings that directly address these concerns. We review results from EEG studies of neurological engagement which indicate that, with appropriate experimental control, results from small samples can be stable, and that results obtained with one sample can be reproduced, with a high degree of reliability, in new samples. Second we report a variety of findings showing that measures of variability in creative quality derived from such indices can significantly predict outcomes, both in laboratory choice experiments and in population-level marketplace behaviour.