Talk is cheap
To quote David Ogilvy:
“The trouble [...] is that people don't think how they feel, they don't say what they think and they don't do what they say.”
This is a challenge we have always faced in the insight industry, if we are really, very honest with ourselves. And we are very conscious of this at Nepa.
But in recent years, behavioral economics has done much to advance the understanding that what people say is often quite different from what they actually do, when interrogating their decisions.
Let’s be clear though. It’s not that people set out to consciously deceive or obscure the facts of their decisions and subsequent behaviors in typical primary research scenarios. It’s more often:
- that they don’t know or can’t articulate what they prefer, what motivates them or which choice they think is best;
- that they can’t remember;
- that they change the way they feel about things from one day to the next.
- and so on.
And therein lies crux of the matter.
We are more emotional than we think we are
We do not always make logical, considered decisions when we think we do. Almost the entirety of what happens in our mental life is not under our conscious control. And this is the irony of asking people to “think about how they feel” about something.
Direct questioning techniques, measuring explicit response – e.g. thinking about feeling – assume logical steps in the decision making process that lead ultimately to, and might even predict, people’s behaviors.
This reflects what Daniel Kahneman calls a system 2 processing modality. Kahneman highlighted that this processing modality is slow, rational, and analytical and involves effort.
But – it is less used in day to day decision making than we might imagine.
What he goes on to explain is a second processing modality he calls system 1. This is a wholly different approach to decision making based on gut feelings. And he attributes much of our decision making to this modality. It is fast, instinctive, intuitive, automatic and rooted in emotions.
Kahneman says that system 1 thinking is influential, guiding and steering system 2 thinking – to a very large extent.
This system 1 processing modality, if one accepts that it is nearer to the truth of day to day decision making than say the processing modality of system 2, has profound implications for how we collect and interpret data in primary research scenarios.