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In a high-stakes digital marketplace, virality is gold.
Capturing viewers’ attention on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, or other social media platforms at the right time and with the right message can spark likes and shares, raise brand awareness, and boost subscriptions and product sales.
Duolingo’s clever use of its mouthy owl mascot Duo to create comedic moments on social media is a classic case. In 2021, the company known for its language learning app released videos of an employee dressed as Duo twerking on a desk and lusting after pop star Dua Lipa. The videos touched an emotional nerve, particularly with a Gen Z audience, helping Duolingo’s TikTok account jump from 50,000 to 1.5 million followers by the end of that year and contributing to massive growth in paid subscribers.
Advertisers, product manufacturers, and tech firms have long known that human emotion is at the core of virality. Until recently, however, much of what companies understood about viewers’ emotional responses to online content stemmed from focus groups and self-reported surveys.
Now the field of inquiry has taken a giant leap forward, and much of it centers on biometrics—the study of eye movements, sweat secretions, facial expressions, and other physiological factors—to “look at what consumers actually feel, not just what they say and think,” said Jenna Drenten, a marketing professor in the Loyola University Chicago’s Quinlan School of Business. “The really interesting thing is that biometric tools tell you how consumers are responding [to physical products and online content] in real time. And that’s valuable information for companies.”
How valuable? Peter Hartzbech, CEO of the Copenhagen-headquartered software company iMotions, says the firm’s AI-enabled biometric analysis platform is used by consumer goods companies, tech firms, auto manufacturers, and healthcare organizations—all told, some 2,700 clients across 107 countries—to study everything from package designs to Super Bowl ads.
How long do people’s eyes remain fixed on particular areas of a video or website? Where do they look first? How much are they sweating? Are they smiling or cringing? Data from eye-tracking cameras and galvanic skin response sensors can tell you. More than that, Hartzbech says, the information can be integrated through machine-learning algorithms, displayed on graphs and heat maps, and interpreted by user experience (UX) researchers and marketing teams to infer users’ emotional states.
“The software tells you the why, basically, of human behavior,” Hartzbech says. “A few years ago, you had to have almost a PhD in mathematics to synchronize these data. Now, as an undergraduate, you can plug it right in [to a software program] and do a real study for real companies.”
Vertical videos and generation attention shifts
That’s exactly what undergraduates in the UX and Biometrics Lab at the Quinlan School of Business are doing. And not only are they designing and conducting their own original experiments, they also are publishing their research in academic journals and presenting their work at international conferences. Many are securing jobs at premier marketing and data analytics firms immediately after graduation—or even before.
“The line between research and teaching is completely blurred,” said Associate Professor Dinko Bačić, the founder and principal researcher of the lab. “[Students] are literally creating new knowledge.”
Take João Vítor Moraes Barreto (BBA ’25), a graduate of the Quinlan Business Honors program who now works as a tax associate for the global accounting firm KPMG. As an undergraduate, he noticed that years of viewing short-form videos had degraded his attention span and ability to read long texts.
“In middle school, I used to be a very avid reader,” Barreto said. “I read 50 or 100 books a year. I was really into it. And then as soon as I started getting on my phone and dealing with all the short-form content, my attention span was just destroyed. It’s really hard to read. And I’ve noticed that it’s not just with me, but basically everyone in my generation.”
Barreto wanted to dig deeper into the phenomenon and the science behind it. In fall 2024, while taking Bačić’s User Experience and Biometrics class, he and his fellow Loyola students used an HD camera and an eye-tracking device to test how high levels of stimulation influenced users’ engagement with TED Talk videos. Recruited Loyola participants viewed short-form vertical videos similar to those that appear on TikTok and embellished with various configurations of subtitles, ASMR content, and split-screen layouts. Analysis of viewers’ gaze movements and fixations revealed an intriguing finding:
“Essentially, the second screen in a split-screen format acted as a soothing mechanism that made people more relaxed and also led to them being more engaged with the video,”Barreto said. “People in my generation are more used to a higher level of stimulation. So showing a video with nothing else [displayed on screen] might be too little stimulation to appropriately engage with it. Once you add some—but not too much—simulation, you reach that Goldilocks point where you get the most out of the video.”
The Loyola research team presented their study at a human-computer interaction (HCI) forum of the MIPRO 2025 convention in Opatija, Croatia, and their associated conference proceedings paper was recognized as one of the top five publications on the iMotions Human Research platform.
The line between research and teaching is blurred. [Students] are literally creating new knowledge.
— Dinko Bačić, associate professor of information systems in Quinlan School of Business
Pushing the frontiers of knowledge
Barreto and his Loyola coauthors are hardly alone in the recognition they have received for their research. A different group of students in the course conducted a study on brand familiarity and information overload in Gen Z smartphone users that was published in the Journal of Consumer Marketing. And other Loyola students have published or presented research on the effect of profanity on video lecture
engagement, subconscious gender-based color preferences in product advertisements, and the use of subtitles in the Netflix series The Crown.
“This is stuff that people don’t do ’til their PhD,” said Anne Price (BBA ’24), a former Lab Fellow who now works as a healthcare analyst at Huron Consulting Group. “We were able to do our study in a semester. I am, for sure, more inclined to pursue a doctorate because I understand at least a little of what’s in store for a research paper you dedicate yourself to.”
One of the key features of the course may be its largely open-ended format—in which Bačić sees his role not as a traditional professor, but rather a “director of practice.” In the first few class meetings, students develop study proposals grounded in academic literature. They then design a proposed experiment and submit the study protocol to Loyola’s Institutional ReviewBoard (IRB) for approval. If given the green light, teams can recruit Loyola students for experiments and conduct testing in the lab in Lewis Towers.
“I think that, as an R1 institution, this is a really good way to integrate those undergraduate students who are really interested in research,” Bačić said. “We have extremely talented students who can do this.” (The Carnegie Foundation designation R1 is granted to universities that, on average, spend at least $50 million on research and development and award at least 70 research doctorates.)
The class is demanding—perhaps one of the most challenging a Loyola undergraduate student can take—but it is scaffolded to set up students for success.
“You’re not going to see a lecture and then do your homework and submit an assignment,” Barreto said, explaining the course’s unconventional format. “That’s not how it works, because the whole class is truly about getting your work published, getting it past the Institutional Review Board, and putting your study out there…it kind of sets us apart because where else does an undergrad get a published paper? It just doesn’t happen.”
Ryan Love (BBA ’24), a former Lab Fellow who now works on the private equity advisory team of the health care consultancy Chartis, told me the course “trains a kind of independence that you don’t get with other classes. Having to drive a project forward on your own, to think creatively about what you’re trying to answer and where you can get data or sources to address your questions is directly transferable to work as a consultant.”
Virality, the holy grail of modern marketing
The throughline among Lab Fellows’ educational and career success may be Bačić himself. After more than a decade working in corporate banking as an analyst and executive, he decided to shift gears and become a professor. The paper that arguably put him on the map, coauthored with Curt Gilstrap, a professor at the University of Southern Indiana, was among the first to pullback the curtain on the matrix of biologic signals that appear to make a video go viral. Published in 2023 in the journal Behaviour & Information Technology, the exploratory study of 64 Midwest undergraduate students demonstrated the potential of using coded facial expression, skin conductance, and social-behavioral data to forecast the likelihood viewers would like, comment on, or share online videos.
To conduct the study, Bačić and Gilstrap showed participants short videos classified by their predicted emotional valence, from chimps at a zoo throwing poop to Budweiser Super Bowl advertisement. Without analyzing the video content or drawing inferences from viewers reported reactions to the videos, the model predicted with greater than 80 percent accuracy whether a video would see high or low engagement. Even though it was based on a small sample size, the finding drew siginificant attention among biometric researchers and marketing analysts. Describing the study in NeuroIS Society Magazine, Bačić and Gilstrap wrote, “An oft-used phrase inour paper’s introduction is that predicting virality is the holy grail of modern marketing, and while we are not claiming the grail is fully in hand yet, such biometric-driven models are a significant step forward.”
I think that, as an R1 institution, this is a really good way to integrate those undergraduate students who are really interested in research.
— Dinko Bačić, associate professor of information systems in Quinlan School of Business
The ethics of choice architecture
Of course, the intensifying competition for people’s data and eyeballs raises a host of ethical questions. Will new tools for juicing digital engagement contribute to social media addiction, which already affects an estimated 5 to 20 percent of teenagers? Will biometric technology be used to surveil users without their informed consent? Perhaps most crucially, what guard-rails can be put in place to ensure biometric technology isn’t co-opted by unscrupulous companies to implement manipulative sales tactics?
Joseph Vukov, an associate professor of philosophy at Loyola and the associate director of the Hank Center for Catholic Intellectual Heritage, acknowledges that these questions raise legitimate concerns, particularly when there is a lack of transparency surrounding data use.
“There are lots of uses you can put this data to, but one of the primary uses, and the reason why a lot of that data is profitable, is that it can be used to more effectively nudge consumers, which is not exactly coercive, but I do think that it can risk undermining or at least atrophying our autonomy,” Vukov said.
“Nudging really takes off in a digital context,” he continued.“The grocery store can’t figure out what cereal boxes you picked up and look at that and then individualize the way the store is arranged the next time you walk into the store. But Amazon does exactly that.”
Another concern, Drenten says, is how the desire for virality can create a self-perpetuating echo chamber. “A lot of research suggests virality is sort of a push and pull. So you have the algorithms on the backend of platforms that are being optimized for attention. And then we have everyday consumers that are learning what the algorithms reward,” Drenten said. “This is why we see memes.
”Memes are not all bad, of course. But they speak to a larger point about the psychological motivations behind human behavior. In evaluating the ethical ramifications of using biometric tools, Drenten says it’s important to consider “choice architecture,” a behavioral framework that illustrates how the design of physical and digital products can influence consumer decisions, often in imperceptible ways.
The framework can serve the social good—such as opt-out organ donation protocols in Europe that incentivize participation—but the same heuristic can be applied to nefarious ends, such as making it extremely difficult to cancel an online newspaper subscription by burying the cancellation option in a labyrinth of screens and menus. So how can biometric tools serve the social good?
One way is evident in a project to improve interactions between caregivers and people living with dementia. In a pilot study shared at the 2026 Virtual Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Geriatrics Society, Bačić and his research collaborators showed how eye tracking may be used to test the validity of a popular therapeutic intervention developed by occupational therapist Teepa Snow called the Positive Physical Approach. The pilot study, Bačić says, could lay the foundation for future research that could meaningfully improve the care and well-being of dementia patients.
“I think that’s what makes the UX and Biometrics lab at the Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University Chicago special,” Drenten said. “We’re at an institution that has heightened focus on ethics and values. So when our faculty and students use the lab for scholarship, they are held to a higher bar.”
