**2. The worldview of Mind Genomics, an 'MRI of the Mind'**

The emerging science of Mind Genomics was created to understand the way people make decisions. Rather than asking people to provide 'logical' and presumably realistic answers to questions about the world of their everyday, Mind Genomics goes in a different direction. Instead of one question at a time, Mind Genomics presents people, the participants in an experiment, to respond to combinations of messages, for example, about dairy, in a short experiment. The pattern of responses to the combinations of messages (so-called vignettes) ends up revealing the aspects of the experience, which really make a difference to the respondent [4, 5].

This paper brings together half a decade of work, beginning in the early years of the twenty first century. The studies focused on discovering the mind of the dairy consumer, or more correctly, the mind of the consumer as it is turned by instruction to dairy products. The original studies were part of larger efforts to map the mind of the consumer, regarding foods, snacks, beverages, and healthful items as a particular focus. We obtained an abstract from simple results of those studies, in a so-called 4 4 design (four aspects of the product and four alternatives to each aspect.).

The Mind Genomics 'project,' as it has evolved since its introduction in 1993 [6], has concentrated on identifying how ordinary consumers 'weigh' the different aspects of a product or service, to come up with a simple overall judgment. Thus, Mind Genomics may be considered a science, which has emerged from multiattribute measurement [7–9].

The importance of dealing with compound stimuli cannot be overestimated. High school science textbooks often discuss a strategy of science, which begins by identifying what is to be studied, and then move on to how the scientist isolates the factor(s) to be studied, reducing all extraneous variability until all which remains is the object, process, or whatever other name is given to the center of focus. The effort is to reduce the 'noise'so that the 'signal' can emerge. When the topic involves thinking behavior, wherein one cannot possibly attain that idea 'quiet' situation, the alternative strategy is to test many hundreds or even thousands of situations containing the 'signal' or factor to be measured, and then hoping the random variability contributed by uncontrolled factors, which is the human element, can be averaged out. Thus, the opposing strategies are to suppress the noise or average it out through replication. There is however a third strategy, one patterned after the MRI, magnetic resonance imaging, in the world of health. The strategy is to take many 'pictures' of the same situation or 'thing' from different angles, and recombine them afterwards to produce a deeply detailed, focused picture. It is this third strategy that Mind Genomics adopts.

*Sequencing the 'Dairy Mind' Using Mind Genomics to Create an "MRI of Consumer Decisions" DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101422*

The objective of a Mind Genomics study is to discover how the respondent 'weights' the different inputs. The higher weights, as discussed below, mean that the message or element in the test stimuli more strongly 'drives' the response toward a defined 'high' point, such as likely to purchase, likely to crave, likely to like the product, and so on. The lower and negative weights mean that the message of element in the test stimuli is irrelevant or may even drive the rating to the low end of the scale, such as would not purchase, not likely to crave, do not like the product, and so on. Mind Genomics studies typically focus on the positive coefficients only, values higher than 0. Values of 0 or lower mean that either the respondent feels that the message drives the response to the lower anchor (viz., the negatives, such as 'do not like the product,') or the respondent often feels that the element is simply irrelevant.

Beyond the creation of a database for each element showing how that element 'drives' the response, the Mind Genomics project focuses on the discovery of underlying mind-sets, that is, groups of individuals in the population who think about the product in the same way. Although we are 'taught' that one can divide people by WHO THEY ARE, such divisions are scarcely useful when it comes to understanding the preferences of people toward products, whether these preferences pertain to product features, product 'benefits', product 'packaging,' and so forth. Until the development of Mind Genomics, there appears to be no efficient, standard way to uncover the latent mind-sets.
