Researchers must coax out the elephant in the room

'How did the Le Shuttle research go?' 'First was okay. But the second group was a bit of a write-off. We had a Saab driver in it.'

This conversation happened over ten years ago – which is why we referred to Le Shuttle, rather than Eurotunnel. We had been interviewing groups of people who routinely took their cars across the Channel in a bid to discover their relative preferences for the (then still relatively new) train service versus the old-established ferries. This was the first I had heard of this ‘Saab driver’ phenomenon. Other researchers may have had different nicknames for this particular character-type, but ‘Saab driver’ was used to describe a peculiarly cut-and-dried breed of respondent to be found disproportionately among the drivers of the Swedish car brand. While other people were happy to acknowledge that they were, despite everything, rather fond of the ferries – and felt comfortable with the ritual they had established for family holidays over the past several years, Saab driver was having none of this: 'This whole conversation is stupid. Five years ago, I had to go by boat. Now they’ve built a tunnel, so I take the train.'

Wherever the conversation strayed, whether it was about relative prices, or seasickness, or buying wine, on on-board entertainment, Saab man would always close the conversation down. 'They built a tunnel, so I use the tunnel. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?' I think Saab man was allowed to stay, even though he irritated everyone else by refusing to acknowledge their views. I don’t think he was so troublesome that the moderator simply handed him his money and told him to clear off – which happens sometimes. Nonetheless, he rode roughshod over any argument other than speed and efficiency. He hence suppressed many interesting nuances of thought by putting a roadblock across any avenues of discussion other than his own.

The loud, articulate, domineering, hyperrationalist man (and it usually is a man) is a known problem in research groups. But, reading Timothy D Wilson’s wonderful book, Strangers to Ourselves (a Paul Feldwick favourite), it occurred to me that the same problem occurs in microcosm when you attempt to ask anyone, even in an individual setting, to explain the reasons for their behaviour in the past – or to predict their behaviour in future. The Saab-driving parts of the brain, even though they exercise only a minority vote in any decision to be made, are simply much noisier and more opinionated than all the others.
The brilliant Jonathan Haidt proposes a metaphorical model for the human brain, which he describes as 'a rider on an elephant'. This is, in its way, similar to Daniel Kahneman’s distinction between System 1 and System 2.

But the metaphor is also richer and more nuanced. The elephant, which represents unconscious mental processes, is, in many ways, wiser than its rider – the conscious, rational self. It is also more powerful – the rider may be able to nudge or train the elephant a little, or coax it here and there, but it cannot really get the elephant to do anything it does not want to do. Moreover, the rider is also slightly delusional – he believes he is in charge of the elephant, and often decides that the elephant is acting under his own bidding, when in reality it is simply doing its own thing for reasons of its own.

The elephant is also a bit of a herd animal and a creature of habit – it likes following other elephants and doing things that it has done before. Perhaps most important of all, the elephant can trumpet but it can’t talk. The rider part of the brain which does the talking is deluded: it thinks elephant-riding is the only skill that matters (managers in businesses are prone to the same delusion).

The fact that the elephant can’t talk is one reason why interpretation in research is such a valuable and undervalued skill.

But there is another issue – very well explained in the newly-released book, Absolute Value: What Really Influences Customers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information, by Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen. Whereas the rider part of the brain believes it has rational, stable preferences for things, the elephant part of the brain is inclined to make things up as it goes along, refining its behaviour whenever new information emerges.

In between asking people whether they prefer Brand A or Brand B, and the actual moment of decision, people will be exposed (often unwittingly) to a range of other forms of information, which may render their initial, stated rational preference almost irrelevant. Their friend uses Brand B. Someone they hate uses Brand A. Brand A gets dissed in online reviews. There is a lot more Brand B on the shelf.

I don’t agree with the Nearly Perfect in their title – not by a long shot. But Simonson and Rosen are surely right about this. The question in research, 'what do you prefer now?', when shorn of any later contextual cues, is one to which the answer may be worthless. 

This article was taken from the June 2014 issue of Market Leader. Browse the archive here.