ABSTRACT
I need to change tack now, to show the results of a very different sort of psychology experiment, one that was extremely time-consuming and laborious to carry out, as we now started to monitor the unconscious eye movements of individuals looking at packaging. (Luckily I had a second dedicated research assistant, Laura McGuire, to take the lead on this.) Why weren’t people buying the low-carbonfootprint products given how positive their underlying attitudes were? I needed to track unconscious eye movements to determine what the brain actually sees when it looks at a product, to see whether this might hold a clue (perhaps they simply never noticed the carbon footprint information). This could prove to be illuminating in many ways. Thousands of minute dots on a computer screen had to be individually coded, but it was essential to finding out what is going on at the most basic level of human perception when people glance at products.
