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No Easy Answers

No Easy Answers

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I’ve been reading Daniel Kahneman’s famous book Thinking, Fast and Slow. It’s all about our self deceiving minds.

As I read it, I realised this wasn’t an issue for ‘other people’ – it was my problem, and that qualitative research often and easily falls into the cognitive bear traps he is describing.

Here are three of his conclusions I didn’t like hearing:

  • Instead of grappling with difficult questions, we substitute them with easier answers to easier questions (difficult question: which is best?… easy answer: I like that one!)

  • We all love to explain away the world we see, because plausible stories feel more powerful and persuasive to us than simple facts (our brains love things feeling like they make sense)
  • We are comfortable with very limited information about things because our brains are programmed to accept this, and to feel this is all there is – he calls this ‘what you see is all there is’ (WYSIATI)

I particularly didn’t like these conclusions because I think what he’s saying has big implications for for qualitative research. It’s the undercover elephant in the researcher’s room…

Let’s imagine the hard question is a research objective:

“How will consumers behave when I launch this new product…? Will they buy it?”

(It’s a hard question because it’s predictive, but also because it requires we look at lots of issues to get close to an answer).

Mostly in qualitative research we substitute that type of hard question with much easier ones…

”Here’s an idea, tell me your thoughts, feelings, likes, dislikes about this idea..”

We ask these types of questions, because they are easy to ask, and easy to answer, so the interview process can flow and feel comfortable.

We also like these questions because the answers can help us researchers come up with a plausible explanation for how people feel about a concept or an idea. We can create a coherent story for our client about why they should or shouldn’t launch the product, and how changes to the idea will help people react more positively to the idea we are looking at.

Research buyers like coherent stories too – they can sell them on to their colleagues in marketing, and everyone can get a nice warm feeling of ‘cognitive ease’.

Putting aside the conclusion from all this that research is, therefore, rather pointless, (because I don’t believe it is, we need to try to understand consumers lives and behaviour, don’t we?)…What are researchers to do?

First, professionals involved in research need to face up to what Kahneman and his colleagues are telling us.

Then we need to figure out the limits of what research really can do, and the best possible way we can do research to tackle the hard questions.

Here are some thoughts about where we might start…

Good question!

We need to ask the right questions. Here are the wrong questions… the easy questions we should avoid:

  • What did you like about it?
  • What did you dislike about it?
  • Why do you think that?
  • When would you buy this?

These force people to rationalise their own behaviour, or they create a focus on future behaviour – but (according to many social psychologists and neuro scientists) people are terrible at knowing their own minds.

Here’s my stab at the right kinds of questions we should be asking:

  • So what are you weighing up? (reflecting how our minds like to compare and contrast)
  • So … yeah… go on… (because being purposefully ambiguous and vague helps encourage creative connections)
  • So what’s the risk to you in buying this? (because we have more to lose than to gain when we try something new)
  • So how would you describe this to someone? (to reveal how someone perceives an idea and to get a sense of social interaction, how an idea could spread…)
  • Who would you want to buy this before you do (because we like to follow people and it’s interesting to learn the type of person associated with a new idea)

These questions are grounded in thinking on how the brain works and how we make decisions. They are still easy questions for people to answer, but they are more appropriate questions designed to reveal our mind’s processes.

However, even when you know the questions you ought to be asking…people will still answer with ‘I like’ and ‘what I think’ type answers if you are showing them an idea and asking them to respond to it. So alongside getting the questions right, we need to present research materials in the right way too.

Showing people concept boards (“introducing new x from x”) will garner the ‘I like’, ‘I don’t like’ response.

BUT asking people to choose from a range of options (your new idea alongside other ideas) is a neat way of getting closer to the decision making processes we employ in everyday life. By including your new idea alongside what’s already out there, we can also avoid the WYSIATI issue – we’re giving respondents a much wider context from which to make their judgements – the current market. These days in NPD research I either show new ideas on the shelf alongside competitors, (that’s the ideal) or in a set of game cards – sketches of new ideas alongside sketches of current products.

These changes to approaches in research aren’t particularly fancy or sophisticated – it’s a tweak to the discussion guide, and a low-tech adaptation to stimulus material, but hopefully they get us closer to being able to tackle the hard questions.

Of course, we need to re-evaluate how we analyse and process the information we get out of research too. We need to be mindful of the danger of providing that nice, neat coherent story for our clients that adds up, but isn’t true, or useful. That’s a tough one! That requires some hard thinking.

Thank you for reading, if you found this useful do pass it on!

Book list:
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
The Social Animal by David Brooks
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
Herd by Mark Earls
Group Genius by Keith Sawyer
Decoded by Phil Barden

kath-handonheart

Kath Rhodes, Qual Street Owner

I love love learning and so I invest time and resources with Ambreen and Claire into exploring social psychology, neuro science, creativity and new techniques in research. Read all about it and help yourself to the ideas that will deliver your business the insight it needs

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@Qualstreet on 17 March 2023