Inside the Mind: Using Neuroimaging to Understand Moral Product Preference Judgments Involving Sustainability

Trying to decide whether to purchase a sustainable product often puts decision makers in a difficult situation, especially if the more sustainable option provides less desirable features or costs a premium. This paper theorizes that adding sustainability as a variable during product choice evaluations create decisions that are moral choice scenarios, where benefit to society is weighed against personal gain. From an engineering design perspective, modeling user preferences in this context can be extremely difficult. While several methods exist to assist researchers in eliciting consumer preferences, the vast majority relies upon conscious input from the potential consumers themselves. More critically, these methods do not afford researchers the ability to understand the cognitive mechanisms underlying what someone may be feeling or thinking while these preference judgments are being made. In this work, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is used to investigate the neural processes behind multi-attribute product preference judgments. In particular, this work centers on uncovering unique features of sustainable preference judgments: preference judgments that involve products for which the environmental impact is a known quantity. This work builds upon earlier work that investigated how preference judgments are altered in the context of sustainability. A deeper look at participant decision making at the time of judgment is examined using neuroimaging with the goal of providing actionable insights for designers and product developers. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4035859]