It boils down to a simple fact: What we say and how we feel are often very different. For any number of reasons, it can be hard to share our true emotions. This makes it challenging to get a true picture of how people feel, and for companies, this makes it much more difficult to be confident that the plans and actions they undertake are in the best interests of their people.

Our emotions drive the vast majority of the attitudes we have and the decisions we make. We all know that we have these feelings – some people call them gut feelings, others call them intuitions, impulses, or something ‘we just know’. How we have come to like some things and why we like them are embedded deep in our nonconscious and we find it very difficult to put those feelings into words.

Understanding these feelings requires different methods to measure our emotions, intuitions and gut feelings. Neurotech® employs Implicit Reaction Time [IRT] tests as part of our unique survey method, to help companies gain greater predictive insight into the emotional drivers that impact their business, including people experience, wellbeing, change & transformation and risk, diversity, inclusion and equality, as well as customer and brand insights.

Neurotech® combines two survey methods: Implicit Reaction Time (IRT) and Explicit Questioning.

The ‘Implicit’ section is the first part of a Neurotech® survey. This uses the IRT and captures automatic, intuitive responses, measuring gut feelings and intuitions that are not within our normal range of control.

The Explicit section comes second, after the IRT section. The Explicit section will be in a familiar format, asking you direct questions, posing a range of answers to choose from, and engaging your conscious mind to consider how to answer.

The data gathered from both sections - Implicit and Explicit – is then compared and analysed at the core of Neurotech. By looking at both sets of responses, Neurotech can identify where your responses align and where they diverge.

Where responses align, what you say and how you feel are similar, pointing to authentic responses that truly reflect how you feel – ‘your heart is in the job’. Where responses diverge, what you say and how you feel are different and these are the areas that are of most interest, because these are where problems arise. The human brain struggles with holding conflicting beliefs or feelings, and will seek to favour one over another. When we are asked to do something that we do not fully believe in, our brain struggles as we face dilemmas and this is a major cause of stress.

The Implicit Reaction Time (IRT) test doesn’t ask questions and doesn’t provide a range of answers to choose from. It’s much more fun, like a game and task oriented. Its really important to read and watch the instructions carefully before starting, as its different to the way traditional surveys are taken. Here’s how it works:

1. We briefly present you with an onscreen statement that relates to the topic being assessed. We call this an ‘affirmation prime’. This statement will then disappear and either the word ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ will appear. Don’t worry if you feel you didn’t read the statement – our brains have automatic reading and will already triggered a response to the statement.

2. All you have to do is press the corresponding key or button, on your device, as fast as you can, to match the word that appears: this will be either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. We do not ask you to decide which to press; your goal is to press the key asked for.

3. The speed of your response in pressing ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ will be influenced by the affirmation prime and captured by Neurotech. You may not notice any difference, but there will be a difference – in imperceptible milliseconds.

4. You will see the same statement appear more than once during the implicit part of the survey. This is to measure your response with both ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ and to validate the data collected.

5. The clever bit is then done by the Neurotech platform, which records thousands of individual key presses, runs them through algorithms and calculates the strength of association - how strongly positive or negative your response is - to each of the statements shown.

It’s a much better way of understanding how you are feeling, without you having to say anything. This helps your company make sure it is creating the right solutions and giving relevant and meaningful support to all its people.

There is over 30 years of academic cognitive psychology and neuroscientific research into the use of implicit methods, including articles from academics, practitioners, and ‘gurus’ in the field. There is also a rapidly increasing number of academic papers on the predictive validity of the approach.

It is well established that much of what drives our behaviour goes on below our conscious awareness and at a nonconscious level. This means that we can’t access many of the emotions that drive our behaviour. This brings into question the value of only using traditional style surveys that require conscious thoughts and responses to questions.

The Neurotech® method bypasses the need for conscious responses and instead measures the true emotions and feelings that drive our attitudes and intuitions. The tool is designed to measure the complex inter relations between colleagues, managers and the businesses they work for, delivering more accurate and granular insights into the sentiment within a business. This particular Neurotech® survey method has been used in over 20 countries by hundreds of thousands of participants.

Cognitive dissonance is a mental conflict that occurs when our beliefs don’t line up with our actions.

Neurotech® can capture cognitive dissonance in a situation where the person believes one thing, but says something different, in order to avoid a work or social conflict. Because Neurotech® is capturing the automatic, implicit feeling of the individual as well as what they say about how they feel, we can see the difference between the two responses - the difference is the area where cognitive dissonance exists. The strength of the cognitive dissonance will depend on the individual and how central the conflict is to their sense of self.

The Truthsayers platform has specific fundamentals built into its Neurotech® method to ensure it conforms with the strictest scientific rigour. One of the first things to understand is that speed alone does not make an IRT; a fast response is important in order to get immediate gut responses and attitudes, but also important is to control how the individual responds.

As soon as you give someone a free choice of what to do and ask them to choose their response, you are opening the possibility for the individual to moderate their response – they can do this because there is no right or wrong answer; the test is then being controlled by the respondent, not the researcher; how do you know if the person is responding honestly? True implicit tests work differently – respondents are not asked to make choices. They merely have to follow a task and press the key on their device when asked to do so. The platform is designed to be gamified.

By flashing up affirmations (statements. e.g. I am happy at work) immediately before the word Yes, or No appear, and then asking the respondent to press a specific key, we can quantitatively measure differences in the speed of response. This can tell us how the individual truly feels about the specific aspects of their job or of the business. This means we can provide relevant and meaningful, details about what’s happening in the business enabling leaders to concentrate their efforts where they will deliver the most benefit.

Our IRTs give us a clear picture of how employees really feel, yet without asking a question and without asking any direct questions - nor have we asked them to evaluate anything.

Another really important aspect of a true IRT is the quality of the data captured. Because of the design, the results can’t be moderated which means the data is metric and always very high quality.

Yes, our surveys can be taken on any device, anywhere in the world - in fact, it’s really important that the survey is taken in the respondent’s native language to validate the results. Our integrated AI tool automatically translates our surveys into any language, which is essential for companies with a global footprint.

Yes! Neurotech provides a range of accessibility options (audio version, colour options for text and background, line spacing and text size options) to enable people who are hearing or sight impaired equal opportunity to take part. Our mantra is that whatever the individual’s personal situation they will never be at a greater disadvantage in a Neurotech survey than they have been historically in the surveys they have taken.

Yes. We work closely with various institutions and associate expert networks in the neurodiversity space including the British Dyslexia Association [BDA] to develop our NeurodiversityToolbarTM that offers various accessibility options for taking our surveys. Options include the ability to extend time, choose different fonts and colours, increase line spacing, as well as the audio option. We are actively engaged with our team of experts and look to continuously review and improve our services.

Our selection of affirmation statements is based on our clients’ objectives which may be to measure employee experience, wellbeing, workplace stress, or many others. We have an extensive database of affirmations that we start from and tailor to specific areas of interest for our clients.

No, the Implicit survey will always come first. This is because we want the respondents’ immediate reaction to the statements without having seen them in advance to ensure we measure their automatic, intuitive feelings and attitudes. Therefore, the Implicit survey is always taken before the traditional-style Explicit survey.

No, we can’t as this breaks confidentiality and anonymity with the respondent. Each survey is designed with secure processes in place meaning we cannot identify an individual respondent. It is not possible to reverse engineer a survey to attribute any part of it to any individual participant who has taken it.

The exception to this is where individuals choose to be part of a self-reflective survey and have given explicit consent to receive a personalised insights report. For these types of surveys, respondents are provided with clear information about how their data will be used, stored and removed.

We abide by strict data privacy protocols, in line with GDPR.

As human beings we read automatically, as soon as words appear in front of us. The human brain can read phrases without consciously registering them. So you are taking the test correctly by focusing on the statements that appear and then pressing the corresponding key when the Yes or No appears, as quickly as you can.

This has been proven by research carried out at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Reading and Doing Arithmetic Nonconsciously: Sklar, A.Y., Levy, N., Goldstein, A., Mandel, R., Maril A., & Hassin, R. R., 2012), where in a series of experiments, more than 300 student participants were non-consciously exposed to words and equations through a process known as Continuous Flash Suppression. Results showed that the students were able to process short sentences and solve equations before they were consciously aware of the words and numbers in front of their eyes.

The Neurotech® method does not use subliminal techniques. Neurotech uses mathematical algorithms to calculate the optimal length of time that we present the affirmations for, based on the number of words in the statement and following scientific statistics for word recognition.

It also needs to be remembered that a Neurotech® study is pulling out attitudes and gut feelings before you can consciously influence this, so speed is of the essence in capturing the response before conscious processing takes place.

The Neurotech® method combines two methods of capturing your responses. The Implicit part is designed to measure your immediate, automatic, intuitive response and attitude, and as such is an accurate reflection of how you truly feel. An opinion requires conscious thought and processing and a considered answer, which may or may not be able to reflect how you truly feel for a number of reasons, such as being unable to articulate the feelings you have. There will be an Explicit part of the survey that comes after the Implicit and in this section, you will be shown the same statements and asked to provide your opinion. By capturing both conscious and nonconscious responses, Neurotech is able to provide the most accurate measure of the feelings and attitudes in an organisation.

The surveys we have developed and continue to develop on our Neurotech® platform conform to the highest standards of scientific rigour. They have been specifically designed to answer the most pressing questions posed in the modern business landscape. Our IRTs provide huge flexibility in terms of the issues that can be addressed and where they can be taken, whether tests are run online, at a central location, or in people’s homes.

The IRT which is now at the heart of Truthsayers Neurotech® has continued to be developed over more than ten years to the highest standards of scientific rigour. The Truthsayers advisory board has a cognitive behavioural psychologist to ensure we adhere to pure implicit principles. It has been used in over 20 countries across hundreds of thousands of respondents and more than 100 million data points captured allowing continuous refining of the tool.

In a double-blind study carried out by our consumer research division for a major personal care brand and aimed at assessing which of several techniques could best predict the uptake of a brand extension, the post-launch results showed that consumers' implicit, but not explicit, responses predicted market uptake.

Published academic articles show that implicit methods predict behaviour and attitudes with greater accuracy than explicitly stated attitudes on topics including but not limited to:

• Brand choice

• Subsequent behaviour (e.g., speeding on a driving simulator)

• Risk taking in Pilots

• Job switch

• Liking of an advert and brand loyalty

There have been numerous academic papers published on the validity of implicit responses as predictors of subsequent behaviour. In a longitudinal study published in 2012, it was even shown that implicit, but not explicit, reactions were able to predict the success of songs in the American charts.