Incest, Smelling T-Shirts, and Dimes (Part Two)

In a previous post, I’d presented several findings suggesting that, on many occasions, our actions are responsive to factors we aren’t aware of. I said this is relevant for marketers, something I will further explore in this post.

First of all, I’d like to go deeper into our inability to pinpoint factors that could have an impact on our behavior and, particularly, explain our reluctance to recognize this fact. In my previous post, I argued that part of the explanation we have difficulty recognizing that our actions could be driven by factors that escape our awareness has to do with our ego; we like to think we are in control and suggesting the inapprehensible character of our motives can be even offensive to some.

A second reason why we do think of our motives as something open to inspection by us could be that we assume we have a special kind of epistemic relationship with our mental life. In other words, we hold the opinion that if there is something we could not be wrong about, that is precisely our mental states. Take the Ames room illusion:

We don’t have any kind of trouble acknowledging that, in the video, our senses deceive us and Philip Zimbardo doesn’t suddenly get bigger, despite appearances. When our attention is directed towards the external world, we can embrace the possibility of error. However, when our attention is directed towards ourselves, inwards, we consider implausible the idea of making mistakes. We deem our inner-world judgments as nearly infallible. We think we have a pretty secure grasp of our beliefs, fears, desires, feelings, etc. and, furthermore, of the relationship between these states and our behavior.

This sense of familiarity with ourselves is perhaps why some people find ridiculous, or even outright insulting, the suggestion that they might need therapy or counselling. In many people’s minds, attending therapy is not something to be ashamed of because it is admitting we’re broken (after all, everyone, to some degree, is) but instead because it is accepting that someone else, from a third-person perspective, could get to know some aspect of us better than we do. Shaking people’s belief that the first-person perspective they have of their own mental lives is correct is hard.

However, as I showed in the first part of this post, looking inwards is no guarantee we will be right. And our errors can be more ubiquitous than we think. Take, for instance, echolocation, the ability to determine the physical location of objects based on echoes and sound waves.

Even though blind persons have developed the skills of echolocating at a more advanced level, most people use echolocation in their daily lives, without even noticing it. Take the following demonstration:

“Wenger Corporation has developed what they call a “virtual room.” This room is able to synthesize the acoustics of a variety of spaces, from an office to a symphony hall (something that practicing musicians have found quite useful). If the acoustics of the virtual room are set to emulate an area much larger than the actual size of the room, listeners can quickly determine that something is amiss. Typically, individuals entering the room will immediately glance upward to confirm or disconfirm their acoustic apprehension of the room. If echoic information were not being regularly used to supplement other sources, one would not expect such a reaction. Clearly, one does not normally glance at the ceiling immediately upon entering a room.” (Schwitzgebel and Gordon, 2000, pp. 237-38)

Interestingly, if you were to ask the previous subjects why they glanced at the ceiling, they would be dumbfounded. The would probably come up with an explanation that overlooks the role of echolocation in its entirety. In short, they would be wrong about the nature of their own experience. And something similar can happen to expert users of echolocation. Many blind people attribute their ability to determine the location of objects to a feeling of pressure on the surface of their faces, not to the real source of it (their sense of hearing). We can be wrong about our own experience, and the sources of our behavior.

Marketers work under the assumption that people are reliable sources of their experiences. For instance, a very common practice in marketing is to ask people for their opinions through methodologies like surveys or focus groups (a small group discussing a specific topic, usually moderated by someone). These methods are a very important part of practices such as market research. For instance, before launching a product, the market research team of a company can mail the product to a few people along with a survey asking for their opinion on it. Based on the feedback, the company can then decide if launching the product is a good idea. If it is not, then the feedback can be used by the company to modify the product (or discard it altogether).

It’s common knowledge in marketing that most product launches fail (the estimates indicate that approximately 85% of them do). The question is why products fail on the market if many of them are precisely what people say they want. A straightforward and somewhat counterintuitive answer is that people do not know what they want; that they are confused about the things that they like or dislike. In line with our previous discussion of echolocation, the lesson seems to be that people are poor judges of their own experience. And, to make things worse, therapy is not there to help them discover it. There are alternatives though.

This idea that consumers’ opinion should not be invariably trusted is starting to gain some traction, as it is attested by the growing popularity of fields such as neuromarketing, where third-person methodologies like Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) are preferred over first-person ones (such as surveys). In consequence, and rather paradoxically, if marketers want to really satisfy their customers’ needs, they should listen to them with a bit of scepticism (or not listen to them at all).