Crowd pleasers: using neuroscience to identify crowdfunding success

x Sponsored content on Research Live and in Impact magazine is editorially independent.
Find out more about advertising and sponsorship.

Raising finance for a project by asking a large number of people to donate a small amount of money has taken off in the past few years. This form of fundraising, which started in 2012, turned the traditional model of asking a few people for large sums of money on its head and became possible because the internet and social media give a reach that would have been impossible in the pre-internet age.

The projects that are crowdfunded – be it kick-starting a new business or getting a one-off project off the ground – are varied, but knowing which ones will be taken up by the crowd has been challenging.

Alexander Genevsky, of Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, and a team of researchers scanned brain activity to see if they could make more accurate predictions of individual choices. The study also showed that activity in one area of the brain could better predict the success of crowdfunded projects than survey or poll answers. In the experiment, the researchers showed 30 people 36 real crowdfunding pitches for documentary films on the Kickstarter website. 

What made you embark on this research?

To date, the majority of work involving the brain and decision-making has focused on predicting individual decisions – that is, using brain activity during a choice or while considering the options to predict the outcome of that decision. We became interested in how individual choice may scale to aggregate choice. How does one person’s decision to fund a project translate to a group funding the project on the internet? While some theories assume that individual choice simply sums to group choice, it may be that some components of choice generalise more widely than others.

What parts of the brain are most connected with engaging in crowdfunding and why?

We found that activity in regions associated with positive affect – that is, the nucleus accumbens – and with balancing benefits and costs (the medial prefrontal cortex) predicted an individual’s choices to fund. Even more importantly, however, only activity in the region associated with positive affect forecast if a project would be successful weeks or months later on the actual crowdfunding website. In fact, this neural activity was more accurate in forecasting crowdfunding success than the answers that people gave in their surveys. This suggests the initial positive emotional response to a request may drive eventual decisions, regardless of other, more deliberative, concerns.

Was your sample big enough to be valid?

While the total number of subjects used in most neuroimaging is not very large, because of cost constraints, we are able to gain a significant amount of statistical power from the repeated-measures experimental designs. Each participant makes many choices, so we can collect many data observations. It allows us to draw conclusions more confidently from fewer participants.

Did you use real-life Kickstarter campaigns?

We used real-life Kickstarter campaigns that had been uploaded just before the study began. As a result, we didn’t know the final outcomes for these projects until well after data collection had been completed – which is a strength of the study.

Can you explain in more detail how the activity in the nucleus accumbens during the decision task predicted project success?

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we measure the neural activity in the nucleus accumbens while our participants, in the scanner, are viewing the crowdfunding proposals. We then compare the activity in this region for projects that were eventually funded on the Kickstarter website with those that were not. Projects that were successful in eliciting funding were associated with greater levels of activity in the nucleus accumbens in our lab participants in the scanner.

What is specific about this part of the brain and its function?

The nucleus accumbens (NAcc) is a core, evolutionarily conserved region located deep in the centre of the brain. It is thought of as a centre of positive, goal-directed behaviour, and is associated with positive affect and reward. Its location, away from the surface of the brain, is why fMRI is a particularly useful tool in this case.

In previous work, two areas of the brain are often implicated in predicting individual decisions – the medial prefrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens. In our study, when we focus on predicting our participants’ own choices, we find a similar result, with both of these neural regions predicting choices. However, when we scale our analyses to the aggregate level – to explore which brain regions predict the real-world outcomes – we find that only the nucleus accumbens remains important. In this case, the medial prefrontal cortex does not add any additional information.

Your findings suggest there is a universality to what makes for successful crowdfunding – how can individual preference not be a factor? 

This is an excellent question and one we continue to pursue. While affective and integrative components might support individual choice, affective components may generalise more broadly across individuals. In other words, our basic emotional response to a choice may be more universally shared across people, and so represent an index of the overall appeal of an option. On the other hand, what makes us individual and leads to our idiosyncratic preferences and behaviour may be very important in keeping us internally consistent, but might be a weaker measure of the more general appeal of an option. 

An example I often like to use is that of warm chocolate cookies. If I were to bring a plate of warm cookies into a room, everyone might want one, but they will think twice before actually taking one. They might decide to pass, for instance, if they remember that they are trying to lose weight, or if they are going out to dinner and don’t want to spoil their appetite. But if we could measure their first neural responses when the plate of cookies arrives in the room – before all those other concerns came into play – we might be able to get a real sense of how appealing those cookies are.

How can these results be used? What would your key recommendations be, based on your findings?

At this point, I think this study is a powerful proof of concept – one from which crowdfunders and marketers could both benefit. Our results suggest that neuro forecasting has the potential to inform us which films are most likely to receive funding, which products may be more successful, or which request campaigns will be the most effective. In future, it is likely to become an important tool for predicting market outcomes. 

Why is this better than doing market research to find out why people have invested?

I wouldn’t suggest we do away with surveys, focus groups and other traditional methods of marketing research. However, I think we are approaching a time when biologically based and neural measurements will play a significant role in mainstream marketing. Additionally, we hope this work leads to deeper insights into the complex mental and emotional process that goes into the real-world choices we make. 

Alexander Genevsky, Carolyn Yoon and Brian Knutson, Journal of Neuroscience, 3 August 2017, 1633-16

This article was first published in Issue 21 of Impact.