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Ian Addie
Ian joined Nunwood as Innovation Director in March 2004 following positions with MORI, Research International and NOP. With more than 15 years valuable insight experience focusing on advanced research methods, he is well placed to suggest big changes are afoot. And Nunwood, he maintains, is prepared.
Read the full biography here. |
Post Rational
The role of neuroscience in probing our illogical choices
By Ian Addie, - 21st January, 2011
The basis of microeconomics, Western business and market research – quantitative - has, at least, for over 100 years largely rested upon the solid bedrock of Rational Choice Theory, in which people exhibit utility maximising behaviour.
This means as individuals we evaluate, analyse and weigh up our options in a considered manner, making choices that deliver the greatest benefits to us.
So it would seem sensible to ask people to tell us what they think of alternative options and for their answers to provide an accurate reflection of the choices they make and the reasons for making them in day-to-day life.
In my formative years as a market researcher, a lot of my on-the-job training centred upon things like ‘The Art of Questionnaire Writing”, which drummed into me the way in which questions should be phrased and the order in which to place questions in a survey. This was to ensure we received accurate objective results, the subtext being that if I ignored these rules it could have a marked influence over the answers I received back.
I, like many others, took this at face value, blindly accepting the mantra and following the rules I was being taught.
In recent years, however, I have begun to reflect on this wisdom and in turn I have been led to ask, if by changing the way we ask a question, we can change the answer, is there something fundamentally inaccurate about the process of conducting a conventional market research survey?
Furthermore, if we look at the application of statistical modelling techniques to market research data, in order to describe the reasons and motivating influences behind people’s actions, then we frequently find the resultant models are poor predictors of behaviour, seldom able to account for more than half of the variability in the behavioural patterns displayed by individuals in a survey.
So why should this be?
Why does asking a question one way give a different answer compared to asking it another way? Why is it that, despite our efforts to isolate and measure every conceivable influence over someone’s behaviour, our ability to predict that behaviour is woefully poor?
In recent years there has been an insurmountable tsunami of opinion, comment and theory, largely from outside of the market research community, helping to shed some light on these questions. Championed by popularist writers such as Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer, work in the fields of neuroscience, cognitive psychology and other related disciplines have brought to the fore the concept of an irrational agent - an individual who is fallible, capable of behaving in one way on one occasion and the opposite way on another, for no apparent reason.
In effect, a human being!
In his book, Descarte’s Error, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes how the human brain and body operate in union to guide advantageous behaviour without conscious thought. Through a series of examples, including the Iowa Gambling task, Damasio demonstrates what might be described as “gut instinct” - the ability of the brain to adaptively select advantageous behaviour outside of any rational thought process on the part of the individual.
Behavioural Economist Daniel Kahneman received a Nobel Prize in 2002 for his development of Prospect Theory, which describes the influence of loss aversion in decision making. It also provides evidence of the subconscious and irrational influences upon our behaviour.
Prospect Theory 101
A sample of people is presented with one of two scenarios, in which they are required to make a decision. Both scenarios are identical in terms of the odds associated with the choices they ask people to make and the potential outcomes. However they are presented in subtly different ways.
In Scenario 1, 600 people have contracted a potentially fatal disease for which there are two possible cures. Cure A is guaranteed to save 200 people whilst Cure B has a 33% chance of saving everybody but a 66% chance that nobody will be saved. The decision maker only has funds for one of the two cures and is asked to make a choice.
Again, in Scenario 2, the disease threatens the lives of 600 people. Cure A will result in 400 people dying (this is the same as 200 surviving in Scenario 1) whilst Cure B has a 33% chance of nobody dying but a 66% chance of everybody dying (again the same as Scenario 1 but with the emphasis on death rather than survival).
What is interesting here is that despite the probabilities and outcomes of both scenarios being the same, the number of people choosing Cure A over Cure B differs markedly between the two scenarios.
In Scenario 1 where the number of lives saved by each cure is emphasised, far more people will opt for Cure A since it guarantees some people will survive.
However, in Scenario 2 where the fatalities associated with Cure A are emphasised Cure B will be opted for more frequently since the 33% possibility of saving everyone over allowing 400 people to die is more compelling.
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So, in contrast to the considered and utility maximising drives upon which Rational Choice Theory centres, the irrational human is led by a wealth of information only available to him or her at a subconscious level.
To quote Tor Nørretranders in his book, The User Illusion, “During any given second, we consciously process only sixteen of eleven million bits of information our senses pass onto our brains. In other words, the conscious part of us receives much less information than the unconscious part of it.”
Furthermore. this subconscious input into our actions cannot readily be articulated verbally, since by nature language is the tool of the conscious and rational mind and it is impossible to verbalise something to which one is not consciously aware.
There is little wonder, then, that market research surveys which have a basis in words are subject to alternative interpretation and response and unable to accurately predict behaviour, since they can only access the small proportion of information that is available to the conscious mind and neglect the majority of subconscious inputs.
This all may seem pretty damning. You might think it is my precursor to call for the abolition of all conventional market research methods and its replacement with the latest neuro-imaging techniques - but you would be wrong.
Firstly, whilst neuro-imaging can provide interesting results, the primary techniques employed have some way to go before they can deliver consistent and meaningful results in a commercial context. Also functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) which measures localised blood oxygen levels in the brain as a proxy for neural activity is fraught with practical issues from a market research perspective, not least of which is the requirement for respondents to be inserted horizontally into an enormous doughnut shaped machine. In addition, fMRI is also only capable of taking snap shots of brain activity at approximately 2 second intervals, so whilst it is able to penetrate throughout the brain and establish neural activity in the subsurface structures involved in processes such as memory encoding and retrieval, there are significant problems in associating activity patterns with exposure to short lived and fleeting stimuli such as TV ads or brand logos.
A cheaper option is to use quantitative Electroencephalography (qEEG) in which a series of electrodes attached to the respondent’s scalp measure localised neuro-electrical activity on the surface of the brain. Although providing rapid measurements, being far more portable, straightforward to set up, and therefore scalable compared to fMRI, qEEG cannot measure subsurface brain activity and so cannot provide as detailed a picture of the neural processes at play when a respondent engages with a stimulus. Furthermore, the technique is prone to noise from vibration and muscle contraction and so at present is only a semi-portable solution rather than offering the unbounded ability to measure neural activity in any real world context.
Technical difficulties aside neuro-imaging techniques have a further limitation for the market researcher in that, for all their sophistication in measuring the activity of the human brain in response to marketing stimuli, they can never tell us why someone responded favourably to an advertisement or less intensely towards one product as opposed to another. They can only tell us if and how someone has responded. In contrast, understanding why is the key to on-going success, as it is that which makes it possible to predict and reinforce positive behaviour - in effect giving us rules to work to.
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So, we should view this post rational era as an opportunity to challenge and improve upon what we do. We must take on board new insights into the workings of our minds, which neuroscience and cognitive psychology offer, and find ways to overcome the inadequacies of our past conventions.
This may be through the combining of techniques in more effective ways in order to triangulate more realistic answers, applying qualitative methods in quantitative contexts in order to make numeric data more reflective of people’s thoughts or expanding our toolkits through cross disciplinary experiences.
In doing so we will be better equipped to tap into the subconscious minds of consumers, understanding what people want and why they want it.
Even when they are unable to tell us themselves. |
Ian Addie
Comments on this article
Want to share your thoughts...?
Hi Janis
Thanks for your comment.
I would agree that hypnosis is one way in which an individual's subconscious may be explored, and indeed in the field of Psychotherapy it is a recognised technique. I think you're also correct in saying that it would be an interesting technique to use within market research and particulary in terms of exploring the subconscious memories that people have relating to brands etc.. However perhaps more so than neuroscience, hypnosis in this context has some major hurdles to overcome from the point of view of ethical concerns. Certainly in the UK the technique continues to have some widely held public misconceptions in terms of peoples fears over being subconsciously manipulated etc.. and even in the hands of a registered medical practitioner many people would be reluctant to voltuneer themselves to be hypnotised - I can see the headlines now "Major multinational company hypnotises its customers - shock!"
As such for hypnosis to become a widely adopted technique in the market research toolkit, no matter how fascinating the results may be, there is a long way to go.
Hi Ian,
Your point is well made about the need for new approaches in a post rational era. To my mind this is where indirect (i.e. not with consumer)approaches like semiotics and archetypal pattern analysis can give real insight into subconscious process. I think the real advances from the neurosciences are in things like the new understandings of the role of REM sleep, trance states and pattern matching as core human phenomena rather than use of brain scanning technology. The other way to more directly tap into subconscious material with consumers is with the deliberate use of hypnosis - a next stage on from projective techniques - which are of course themselves trance inducing though rarely acknowledged as such. There is a real reticence and fear in the UK about exploring the use of hypnosis as a viable methodology for market research - though it is used a bit more openly in the US. I've studied hypnosis because this is where to me the best information lies on subconscious process - more discussion and understanding on the role of hypnotic processes in marketing and advertising would be a great step forward.
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