Notice how Leif's attempts to describe science offer us an insight into how Leif thinks which we can see from Jeff Schmidt's description of the archetypal professional scientist is probably part of a larger culture. It seems that even if people talk about science as a way of better understanding the universe which surrounds them, it is perhaps culturally under appreciated that the challenge of thinking about wicked problems creates opportunities for us to learn quite a bit about how we think ourselves.
As you noticed, Leif is clearly being selective about what to focus his rational and symbolic faculties on. If the rational mind is like our secret weapon, in a general sense, people nevertheless treat it as though our ammunition is limited.
An interesting direction worth considering for a scientific social network might be to create tools which help the user to monitor and reflect upon the nature of their thought processes. When I read critiques of market research methodologies, based upon social psychology research, I see patterns which seem to mimic the way in which people select scientific theories. The processes which guide us through buying products and selecting models seem to reflect the way in which we deal with information overload and complex problem-solving within the context of incomplete information.
, by Philip Graves, and switch out consumer product with scientific model, as you do so:
The human brain operates on a system of “short cuts” and “rules of thumb.” Without these corner-cutting decision-making tools we’d never get anything done in life. And because of the same neural wiring, we often get ourselves in a heap of trouble doing some incredibly foolish things.
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While many of us are happy to mock the more extreme superstitions of others – donning the team shirt at the last possible moment, putting on shoes in a particular order, using the same tennis ball after serving an ace – they reveal a human willingness to stick with what we believe has helped us in the past.2 As Derren Brown points out in his book Tricks of the Mind, we find ways of making our actions appear to have a bearing on events even when they not only have no reasonable basis for doing so, but also with a disregard for the numerous occurrences when, despite applying them, we have not achieved our desired outcome.3
So it is with market research. On the occasions when a research report’s findings coincide with a positive outcome, it is taken as proof that the process was worthwhile and contributed positively to the course that was taken. Since we’re certain that everyone can accurately report what they’ve done, what they think, and what they will do, any instance when a research-informed outcome is wide of the mark is swiftly dismissed as an aberration or the result of the corruption of an otherwise legitimate process. This capacity to believe that conscious will drives our actions is a fundamental part of the human condition. It is both the reason that asking people questions isn’t likely to lead to genuine insights and the reason people are convinced that it will.
The fundamental tenet of market research is that you can ask people questions and that what they tell you in response will be true. And yet, as you will see, this is a largely baseless belief. In fact, it turns out that the opposite is far closer to the truth. When we ask people a question we make it very unlikely that they will tell us the truth; inviting a “discussion” fares no better. The conscious mind finds it almost impossible to resist putting its spin on events. From the moment we do anything it introduces distortions; when the mind considers the future it does so with an idealism that is both optimistic and simultaneously devoid of any objective assessment of the past.
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There is a way to obtain a deeper understanding of consumers and make better-informed decisions. When the philosopher Mark Rowlands reflected on his years living with a wolf, he concluded that humans had virtually lost the ability to appreciate the present, so wrapped up are we in dwelling on the past and wondering about the future. The problem he sees this causing is that we both want our lives to have meaning and are unable to understand how they can do so. In our quest for significance, we miss the moment of now.4 When it comes to market research I believe the same situation exists: what drives us into questioning the why and what will be gets in the way of us fully appreciating the right now. It is in the moment of consumer behavior that we have the best opportunity to understand what is taking place. It is in this moment that we can understand how the environment and presence of other people change what we do
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The market research industry has been slow to embrace the nature of human consciousness.
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Nevertheless, the belief remains: “Of course you can find out what people think by asking them, you just have to ask them the right questions in the right way.” The market research industry has gone on unabashed; companies still believe that reassurance can be found in the exchange of corporate question for consumer answer and politicians that public opinion can be gauged from a poll or focus group. No verifiable alternative has emerged for product development, because the crux of the matter is far more challenging to a business world and research industry that rely heavily on the reassurance that market research provides: consumer behavior is a by-product of the unconscious mind, whereas research is inherently a conscious process.
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Most organizations don’t understand consumer behavior or how and why their marketing works (or doesn’t work). The unconscious mind is the real driver of consumer behavior. Understanding consumers is largely a matter of understanding how the unconscious mind operates; the first obstacle to this is recognizing how we frequently react without conscious awareness. As long as we protect the illusion that we ourselves are primarily conscious agents, we pander to the belief that we can ask people what they think and trust what we hear in response. After all, we like to tell ourselves we know why we do what we do, so everyone else must be capable of doing the same, mustn’t they?
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Most people can identify with that moment of driving a car when they realize that, for some indiscernible amount of time, they have been driving without conscious awareness. The section of journey has been uneventful, they have progressed without incident or harm, but they have no recollection of what has occurred or for how long they have been consciously absent from the driving process. Contrast this experience with the first time you sat in a car and attempted to coordinate the actions of steering, depressing the clutch, balancing the clutch and accelerator, selecting a gear, timing the release of the handbrake, and so on. I can still recall bouncing my driving instructor away from the traffic lights on my third lesson as I struggled to combine raising the clutch and depressing the accelerator simultaneously. An extraordinarily complicated array of actions is learned and assimilated, to the extent that we can do them without conscious thought.
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So what is happening in those moments when we don’t consciously know what we’re doing? How are we making decisions? How accurately can we be expected to self-analyze and report on our behavior?
What would it mean if this phenomenon were not unique to matters of transportation? What if we often do things without being aware that we are doing them? What if that is often the case when we are choosing or consuming products? How useful would it be to ask consumers what they think about a brand, product, or service if the unconscious mind plays a part in their consumption?
We are surrounded by examples of how the unconscious mind and conscious mind behave very differently, examples that show the contributions that each makes to the way we behave. One function of the unconscious mind is its ability to screen out information, enabling us to focus on one area more effectively. A 2 year old who has yet to develop these powers will find a shop far more distracting (as any parent in a hurry will testify).
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We all experience moments when we can t quite grasp some thing we feel sure we know. This is because our mind doesn't store the information we reference from our memory in an absolute way. In his infamous known knowns speech, former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forgot to mention that there are things we know that we can t recall at that moment, what he might have called unknown knowns if he'd remembered them. Researchers have used fMRI scans to explore this phenomenon. Asking participants to remember unusual word pairings such as alligator and chair by putting them into a sentence, they tested their recall of individual words from a list containing a mixture of individual words they had been shown and others they had not, while scanning which regions of the brain were active. Only when the second word was provided as a cue did one area, the hippocampus, become involved, at which point participants were able to recall their sentence with much greater detail.3
Our unconscious minds have vast amounts of data that we regularly rely on to make decisions, but we have no direct, conscious access to those processes. And that's a problem if a business is expecting customers to respond accurately in research. Asking someone to taste a sample of a product seems an entirely reasonable thing to do, as does asking them what they think of what they've tasted. On the other hand, the normal purchase process involves neither of these elements, but does involve referencing a different set of mental associations to do with factors such as temperature, thirst, previous experiences of the product, and the context in which you find yourself. When taste-test results are considered in this context, any result they produce seems far less compelling.
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When an electrical retailer asked me to investigate its ticket design for washing machines, I found more evidence of the gap that can exist between what people would like to believe they will do as consumers and what actually happens. I asked people prior to buying such an appliance how they would make the decision and they provided a rational set of criteria, generally relating to price and one or two specific product attributes (such as spin speed and load capacity). Each person expected the purchase process to be straightforward; after all, they had owned and used a washing machine for years and were comfortable with the product. However, as I watched shoppers in a store it was apparent that a rational purchase decision, even of a major product such as this, was virtually impossible.
There were 40 white boxes that either were washing machines or looked like them from a distance (washer-dryers being virtually indistinguishable from more than a few feet away). Each product had an information label with up to 20 technical specifications for the product, and further information such as product dimensions, accessories, and extended warranty options. Any customer had at least 800 data points to compare. Assuming that they could consolidate their choice by two variables, say spin speed and price, this would still represent 80 data points to weigh up!
Arguably, a logical response to this would be to grab a pen and paper and start writing things down, design a spreadsheet to compare them, or at the very least seek independent advice from someone who might have had the capacity to make such a comparison. However, the very real need for a washing machine and the prior belief that such a purchase should have been simple must compete with the unexpected complexity and confusion that the actual task of buying one has introduced. Often this cognitive dissonance isn't manifested as a rational awareness that buying a washing machine is harder than had been anticipated; it arrives as feeling of awkwardness, as though the unconscious mind throws out a generic error message.
So what happens? Either the unconscious screens out options at a very general level and defaults to something familiar, or the customer lets someone else (the salesperson) make the decision for them, or they walk away, making up a reason why they haven't got a product they really do need. The resulting rationale for their actions can be extremely tenuous. One woman I interviewed justified her selection by saying: I decided to get this brand because my mother had one that lasted for years, although I know they don t make these as well as they used to. I had watched her spend several minutes comparing, or at least attempting to compare, machines from several manufacturers at a similar price point and hypothesized that the process had become overwhelming. When I discussed her experience in the context of the confusion that I suspected she'd experienced, she said she had wanted to look at a wider range and make an informed choice, but had been overcome by the number of alternatives.4
When I put just two tickets in front of her and asked her which appliance she thought would better suit her requirements, she changed her decision from the Hotpoint she had selected to buy to a Whirlpool model. It confirmed my theory that her chosen purchase had far more to do with the psychological discomfort of making a choice from so many options and far less to do with her rationalized washing machine ideals.
This example highlights another conflict between the conscious and unconscious mind. When you ask them, most people say they want choice; often it will be a conscious consideration when selecting a retail outlet for a purchase – I'll go to X because they have the biggest range. Choice is a good thing, isn t it? Social psychologists Iyengar and Lepper carried out an experiment that illustrated how, in practice, more choice isn t necessarily beneficial.5 They evaluated reactions to two tasting tables at a supermarket; on one they laid out 24 different jams and on the other just 6. While more people elected to stop for the wider selection (60% vs 40%), a dramatically higher proportion purchased from the selection of six jams, whereas only 3% did so from the larger choice. Put another way, less than 2% of people will buy from a display of 24 jams, but 12% will if you give them a choice of just six.
This simple but elegant study illustrates the point perfectly: what someone thinks they want, and will say they want because it seems sensible and reasonable, may conflict with what really matters to their unconscious mind when the moment in question arises. At that point it will be the unconscious mind that determines what happens next.
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Ultimately, the reasons that are consciously hypothesized for consumers choices ... end up being a reflection of the desire to see ourselves as fundamentally conscious creatures.
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Social psychologists are continually exploring the ways in which we are unaware of what really shapes our behavior, and the extent to which it is at odds with our self-perception.
Recent research has shown that smells that are too faint to be consciously detected can influence how we act. Our senses are constantly filtering information and in doing so they process much more than they bother to bring to our (conscious) attention. Dr. Wen Li and colleagues at Northwestern University asked people to sniff bottles containing one of three scents at such low concentrations that most participants were not aware of having smelled anything.8 They were then shown an image of a face with a neutral expression and asked to evaluate its likability. The researchers found that the type of smell influenced the reaction to the face, but only when the smell had not been consciously noticed. Our unconscious mind is great at collecting data, but it doesn t let our conscious mind in on what it's collected or how important it has deemed it to be, nor how it has influenced what we ve gone on to do.
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The same is true of our visual sense: how people respond can be influenced by things their eyes have seen that they haven t consciously registered.9 Bargh and Pietromonaco conducted one such study where participants were asked to take part in an exercise on a computer screen, during which half were exposed to words flashed on the screen at a speed too quick for conscious awareness.10 The words were associated with antagonism (such as hostile, insult, and unkind. In a subsequent, and ostensibly unrelated, experiment, the same people were asked to make a judgment about someone based on an ambivalent description about him: A salesman knocked at the door, but Donald refused to let him enter. Those who had seen the flashes of hostile words judged the person to be more hostile and unfriendly than the group who had not seen these words.
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we don t need our conscious processes to act effectively ... when our conscious faculties are working properly, we're adept at creating a justification that works for us.
Our selective attention is continually screening out a huge amount of information but, as I have explained, that doesn t mean that this information isn't being processed. Quite the opposite: in order to screen it out we must first receive it. Studies such as those by Bargh and Pietromonaco show that, while we are not consciously processing it, our unconscious mind can be changed by what passes through it, leaving us with no realization that such a change has taken place and certainly no ability to report it accurately after the event.
The unconscious mind appears to operate as a first-stage pattern checker, the first, and sometimes only, stage in the processing and reacting chain. However, since people have no direct access to the references it's using, consumer research respondents are unlikely to report accurately its role in their decision making. Consequently, the information provided by research that is responded to at a conscious level has bypassed a critical stage of mental processing that may well prevent the person ever acknowledging its existence.
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Practical examples of these unconscious filtering processes and their impact abound with internet retailers. Their capacity to make small changes and observe their impact using split tests that randomly assign visitors to different versions of a website have found dramatic differences in response, and sales can be achieved with alternations that appear incidental and certainly reflect elements of design that we would never consider influential in shaping our own behavior: changing a headline, shifting the position of a message, or using a different color on a page can transform how people react to what is ostensibly the same message.
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Numerous studies reveal that the unconscious mind works in terms of associations.
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You may well think at this point: Well, if someone can consciously choose to override the desire not to press the red button, surely what matters is what they consciously think. But in most circumstances, and certainly in most consumer scenarios, people aren't challenging themselves (or being challenged) to act against their instinctive response. Instead, their feelings will be triggered by the unconscious associations they process and, just like Moll's hypnotized subject, they will look for reasons to justify that feeling.
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The idea of getting something new is, for most people, exciting and appealing. A casual glance at the pace of progress in the developed world and the rate at which people assimilate new products is a powerful illustration of our collective thirst for innovation. However, what appears to be a taste for novelty, even to the extent that we believe it's something we consciously desire, masks the fact that our first instinct tends to be much more cautious. The thorny problem of a discrepancy between our conscious view of ourselves and the role our unconscious takes in protecting us can all too easily prevent us from selecting something new or different.
This propensity to be risk averse can be challenging to accept. After all, you have all the positive mental associations from new things that you have bought or, even better, been given: the ceremony of unwrapping boxes, the anticipation of the first experience, the thrill of the first time you use whatever it is. But these belie the reality that, on a daily basis, you frequently make an unconscious decision not to do something new: to put your shoes on in the same order, to buy the same newspaper every day, to watch an episode of a television series even though you've seen it several times before.
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While people might like the idea that they are open to new ideas and willing to take a chance on something, there is no personal risk in telling a market researcher that you would buy the product being shown to you in the focus group. When it comes down to a real purchase decision, however, the unconscious mind's desire to avoid risks can often make the choice of something new feel far less appealing.
It's easy to illustrate this type of loss aversion with children in a different way. Ask them which toys they like and you will get a list. Then tell them you are going to get rid of several that they haven t mentioned, are way too young for them, and they no longer play with, and they will forcefully state that they want to keep them.
For some reason, presumably of evolutionary benefit, people feel loss far more powerfully than they feel gain.
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It is intriguing to speculate about why we should be so sensitive to potential loss. One theory is that the unconscious mind is preoccupied with safety, checking the environment rapidly and evaluating what is a potential threat, conducting a first pass of the data to protect us from potential dangers.
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The extent to which people will go to minimize the risk of feeling bad in the future is considerable. In the project I undertook watching people buying washing machines, I saw one woman wander around the display of appliances for 30 seconds without actually looking at any appliance in a way that suggested she was seriously considering it. Eventually, she stopped by a particular appliance and waited for a salesperson to come over to her. While pretending to be testing the robustness of the hinge on a tumble dryer, I listened in to the conversation that took place. The woman declined the offer of help and advice, stating that she wanted the washing machine in front of her. When the salesperson asked if she had purchased the brand before, she said that her last three machines had been made by the same company; she also expressed the hope that this one wouldn't damage her clothes like the previous two had. Logically, rationally, and (above all) consciously, her choice made little sense. However, viewed as a response to the confusing variety of products on offer, and a fear that a brand of which she had no empirical experience might be worse, the devil you know policy makes a sort of sense.
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Being mindful that people are primarily focused on not making a bad choice – in other words making a safe choice, rather than necessarily making the best choice – can provide a powerful insight into why they do what they do, and the lengths to which it may be necessary to go if you are to encourage them to do something different. Unless the environment is such that they are already in a risk-taking mindset (for example at a theme park or perhaps in a night club), or they are making an extremely deliberate and conscious decision, they will require a significant level of persuasion to break with what feels unconsciously safe.
Why do new products often start out with a trial price? Because most marketers realize that a financial discount can not only help get the product noticed on the shelf, but also offset the unconscious risk associated with deviating from the usual choice. While there has been some debate whether what drives this is a fear of risk (loss aversion) or a preference for the status quo over change, the effective result remains the same: people are often very resistant to trying or doing something new, however logically compelling that alternative is.
The conscious mind is far more receptive to new concepts than is the unconscious. New things arouse our curiosity. Knowing which type of thinking is more involved at each stage of a consumer decision is crucial to understanding the likely accuracy of any research methodology.
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Another factor that can help explain why people do things, which again runs counter to our preferred view of ourselves as independent-thinking entities, is our striking propensity for copying what other people do. This capacity has become a topic of great philosophical and psychological interest in recent years under the topic of memes
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When people see others doing something, at the very least they tend to form a view about it, and in many cases will go ahead and copy it.
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the fact that we acquire language at all and that we talk so much, all reflect our love of copying and having ourselves (and our ideas) copied.
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It's almost impossible to overestimate the importance of what people encounter first for what they go on to think. Much as we may all like to pretend that we re objective, well-balanced, and rational judges of what we encounter, research shows that we're primed by our first experiences and, from there, go about seeking evidence that will fit with what we've decided is right.
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In my own work I've found that not only is there a tendency for people to select a middle option of three or one of the middle two options of four choices, but also that they will make an effort to construct a situation where they give themselves a small number of alternatives from a much wider selection to make this possible.
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It can be particularly important to know what people look at first when they are buying. In Chapter 2 I pointed out how susceptible we are to priming, attaching greater significance to what we see or hear first. Where customers glance first is of major importance because it can prime the way in which they perceive everything thereafter.
While knowing where people look provides no guarantee of knowing what they are mentally processing, it can be a useful reference point, especially when the amount of time is also considered. A fleeting glance is indicative of the unconscious mind reflexively scanning what it encounters; hypothesizing what associations it might have instantaneously connected to what it sees can be revealing. A longer look either means that more of the area has been reflexively scanned – an indication that they are searching for something that either is or feels familiar – or that one aspect (at least) of what they're studying is being referenced consciously in some way.
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When you are sufficiently familiar with behavior in a given context, you can infer a surprising amount from how long someone spends looking at something.
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As we get older we learn to be more sophisticated about what we see and how we see it. We are taught not to stare at other people. We project the values, prejudices, and insecurities we've acquired through the years onto what we see to reassure ourselves that we're right. The models that our unconscious mind has learned serve our basic needs, such as for parental approval (essential to life when young) or personal empowerment. As a result, we lose the child's ability to see things as they really are; the social level of a situation conceals the real agenda of the person or people involved.
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[S]ocial psychologists have shown that asking someone to talk about something can change their opinion about the subject matter. Janis and King found that rather than their being fixed, beliefs can be created through behavior. Participants who made a speech playing the role of someone who believed in a particular issue were found to have become believers in the issue itself afterwards.32 In other words, the act of making the speech formed the belief, rather than a prior belief being constant throughout the forced experience.
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[T]he researchers discovered that strong brands were processed with less effort and activated areas of the brain involved in emotional processing and associated with self-identification and rewards.36
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[P]eople who have gone to the trouble of purchasing something tend to value it more highly than people who haven't … This phenomenon, known as the endowment effect, was first identified by Richard Thaler in 1980 ... it only takes a few moments of ownership for people to value something significantly more highly.
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Despite what we might like to tell ourselves about our pioneering and independent nature, most of our behavior comprises doing much the same as the people around us. The chances are that we'll be one of the thousands of people buying the book about an explorer that we've seen on the bestseller list, not the intrepid soul who did the actual exploring in the Amazon rainforest. The evidence shows that we can't help but care what other people think and will go to great lengths to conform.
In 1935 the pioneering social psychologist Mazafer Sherif invited people to take part in an experiment using the autokinetic effect. Participants looked at a point of light in a darkened room and were asked to report whether they thought the light was static or moving, a recreation of a natural phenomenon first observed by astronomers who thought that stars were moving. When participants were asked individually opinion was equally divided; however, when they were put into groups people tended to agree with the majority, even if this meant contradicting what they'd said originally. Later, when asked individually, they continued to subscribe to the group view. In other words, when placed in the context of a group, people will devalue their own opinion in the interest of developing an arbitrary position that is acceptable to the group.
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The neuroscience of how group influence affects behavior is still in its infancy. One recent study explored the mechanisms that cause people to tend to like what their friends like. Neurologists conducted fMRI scans of teenagers brains while they were listening to unfamiliar music spanning several genres. Each participant was played a number of songs and asked to rate how much they liked them. Then they were shown how popular the song was among a large reference group. To make sure that people weren't contrary for the sake of it, participants knew that they would receive a CD containing their favorite tracks at the end of the study.
As they expected, the researchers found that people did adjust their ratings to conform to the popular opinion of the tracks. However, what they discovered from brain activity throughout this process was what was so fascinating. From the areas of the brain involved (the left and right anterior insula was active in those who changed their preference), it seems that people switched their preference because they were anxious that their opinion didn't match up with those of other people. This neural activity is distinct from activity for reward and utility; in this case it seems that the music became more appealing not because it was liked or appreciated for its own sake, but because not liking it was worrying.4
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Research suggests that people enter a group discussion with a misconception of the position of the other participants; they tend to assume that they will have a stronger view than the group, and to have an ideal position that is more extreme than the one they're prepared to voice. When the arguments raised in the group discussion support the initial position, people feel a need to shift their declared position in that direction.
In other words, we like to perceive ourselves as more in the socially preferred direction than the people we compare ourselves with. It seems that we run a constant mental scorecard assessing what the social average is, to make sure that we position ourselves just above it.
Interestingly, reading or listening to arguments generally produces less effect than actual participation in the discussion. It has been suggested that it's the mental process of actively rehearsing or reformulating an argument that brings about the shift in position; through the process of expressing it to others, we convince our selves of our own argument.10 Building influence by instigating debate around a subject or brand is what makes viral marketing and political blogging so effective. When the topic is skillfully released or the fuse of debate lit in the right way, the resulting impact can be dramatic.
The challenge for focus groups is compounded by the frequently humdrum subject matter on which they focus. It is one thing to feel that you will stand your ground in a debate with strangers about the death penalty or a solution to the problems in the Middle East, but the packaging of a breakfast cereal or your reaction to a new biscuit is not something most people are likely to feel passionate about. Research analyzing discussion content has shown that the largest shifts in attitudes occur where the subject matter is mundane and the argument put forward novel. Many focus groups will create the attitudes they report, rather than reflect views that are representative of people who haven't taken part in the discussions facilitated for the research process.11
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When a group of people make decisions jointly or work together to reach a conclusion about something, there is a risk of groupthink, a phenomenon first explained in detail by American psychologist Irving Janis back in the 1970s. He realized that groups making decisions had the capacity to reach those decisions with insufficient critical analysis and with too much deference to the prevailing point of view.
The book itself is meant to introduce social psychology issues to market researchers, but it seems to me that there is value to repurposing this research as food for thought on how we might help people to think better about science. The cost of eye-tracking has been steadily going down for some time now, and it's just starting to become an affordable technology. This raises some interesting possibilities, which are perhaps best hinted at with the following
If computers can be trained to translate the data sets generated by these technologies into information about when our subconscious mind is directing us, then here's a question:
