From the December Globe and Mail Report on Business Magazine

Marketers already know we’re copycats at heart. Now science proves it

Most of us believe we make up our own minds in the marketplace: Apple or Dell, Brooks Brothers or Boss, equities or gold. But recent studies suggest we exert less control over these decisions than we realize. Or, at least, we may not make choices in either of the two ways we typically assume we do: that is, either in accordance with innate individual taste, or based on an objective appraisal of the options.

Instead, it may be that our choices are largely the result of exposure to peers from whom we “catch” our preferences, just as we would catch a virus. Consumer desire, in this light, could be described as contagious.

This idea isn’t entirely new. Over the past few hundred years, various philosophers and economists have concluded that desire isn’t merely a straight line connecting a person to the object they want, but rather a triangle, ghosting in a third party who ignites the inclination. Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, may have put it most succinctly: “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other.”

That much may be obvious. We’ve all witnessed fashion ideas spread from one person to another. Real estate and equity prices, likewise, often move sharply as investors acquire or divest based solely on their exposure to other investors doing the same thing.

What is new, however, is evidence of a neurological basis for this effect. In the late 1990s, researchers at the University of Parma in Italy broke open the discussion when they discovered the presence of “mirror neurons” in monkeys’ brains. They had noticed that the same areas in a monkey’s brain fired when the animal cracked open a peanut (or ate a raisin or a banana) as when it saw another do the same thing. The “mirror” systems in the human brain, of course, are much more complex and give rise to a wide range of imitative behaviours that shape how we learn, how we relate to one another and, not incidentally, how we act as consumers.

Martin Lindstrom’s bestselling book Buyology illustrates the connection between mirror neurons and buying behaviour, describing how retailers like Abercrombie & Fitch deploy brand-clad undercover models to hang around their stores. There’s nothing new in hiring models, but at A&F, they are strategically placed to activate the parts of a shopper’s brain that encourage imitation, right at the crucial point of sale.

Fascination with this phenomenon continues to grow. Researchers at Emory University have proven that even a cartoon representation of a chimpanzee will induce mirror responses in live apes. An Oxford University study of rural Chinese villagers proved that “happiness is infectious,” leaping causally to others in proximity. And at the University of Zurich, experiments have shown that the performance of low-productivity workers improves when they do their jobs within eyesight of more productive colleagues. “Clear and unambiguous evidence in favour of the existence of peer effects,” they wrote.

You might think that as we learn about these effects, their power over us would actually diminish. But a recent New York University study suggests the opposite: In a paper titled “How you named your child,” Todd Gureckis and Robert Goldstone drew on 140 years of American baby-naming data to show a dramatic shift. In the early 20th century, the popularity of baby names fluctuated in a statistically reliable pattern, with a name more likely to be chosen if its popularity had been on the wane. But in a steadily increasing correlation from the 1960s onward-a time when, Gureckis says, “people felt free to name a kid whatever they liked, with no social cost” -parents began to prefer names that had actuallyrisen in popularity.

For marketers, the discovery of mirror neurons is a finding of central importance. We may have always sensed that the best ads motivate us to imitate the behaviour of others. Now it’s a scientific fact.