The magical way to capture emotions

Flood – 13 December 2022

What’s not to like about new technologies that promise to reveal the true emotions of respondents without actually asking them?

Technologies like gaze tracking, sentiment analysis, facial movements, gait analysis, heartbeats, facial expressions and more. Combine these with a healthy dose of AI and you can reach beyond the conscious mind and have a good look inside the subconscious.

Wow. Magical!

There’s just one problem. They don’t work.

The Information Commissioner’s Office has – as reported in The Guardian and elsewhere – taken an extraordinary step and issued a “blanket warning on the ineffectiveness” of this technology.

Stephen Bonner, the Deputy Information Commissioner, said, “There’s a lot of investment and engagement around biometric attempts to detect emotion. Unfortunately, these technologies don’t seem to be backed by science…there doesn’t seem to be any sense that these work.”  

Back to the drawing board then on this one.

Fortunately, there is an alternative to the ‘half-baked, hokum fake science’ (words used by the ICO, not me). It’s a method we at Flood + Partners have been using with great success.

It’s called talking to people. I’ll admit, it doesn’t sound quite as ‘sexy’ or as ‘edgy’ as all this high-tech stuff. But it does have one important advantage. It works, just as long as you do two important things.

You ask the right questions. And you ask them in the right way. That’s where the real magic lies.