You're Not Listening

by Kate Murphy

In the psychological literature, negative capability is known as cognitive complexity, which research shows is positively related to self-compassion and negatively related to dogmatism. Because they are able to listen without anxiety and are open to hearing all sides, people who are more cognitively complex are better able to store, retrieve, organize, and generate information, which gives them greater facility for making associations and coming up with new ideas. It also enables them to make better judgments and sounder decisions.

  Apple cofounder Steve Jobs famously hired people who weren’t afraid to push back on his ideas as hard as he pushed, often brutishly, on theirs. There was even an award given out every year by Apple employees to whomever did the best job standing up to him. Jobs knew about it and loved it. It’s as if he was looking for people who would force him to listen when his nature was to run roughshod over them. In one instance, an employee reportedly argued with Jobs but eventually backed down, exhausted by the fight but still convinced Jobs’s logic was flawed. When it turned out the employee was right, Jobs berated him. “It was your job to convince me I was wrong,” Jobs said. “And you failed!”

  By contrast, Apple’s former chief design officer, Jony Ive, who oversaw the development of Apple’s most important products, including the iMac, iPhone, iPod, and iPad, has said a manager’s most important role is to “give the quiet ones a voice.” While Jobs and Ive had different approaches to—and perhaps different tolerances and aptitudes for—listening, they both seemed to understand its importance. Listening is the engine of ingenuity. It’s difficult to understand desires and detect problems, much less develop elegant solutions, without listening.

  To listen does not mean, or even imply, that you agree with someone. It simply means you accept the legitimacy of the other person’s point of view and that you might have something to learn from it. It also means that you embrace the possibility that there might be multiple truths and understanding them all might lead to a larger truth. Good listeners know understanding is not binary. It’s not that you have it or you don’t. Your understanding can always be improved.

  8

  Focusing on What’s Important

  Listening in the Age of Big Data

  At a yucca- and cactus-landscaped resort atop a rust-colored butte in Tempe, Arizona, the annual conference of the Qualitative Research Consultants Association, or QRCA, was a cacophony of networking. For a gathering of professional listeners, it was surprisingly loud and frenetic. Attendees darted between events in the conference center’s warren of Native American–themed meeting rooms, leaving zigzag scuff trails in the nap of the wall-to-wall carpeting. According to the conference brochure in my swag bag, we were there to “focus on mastering the art and science of uncovering, and sharing, insights.” And there would be sunrise yoga and an ice-cream sundae bar in the afternoon.

  Qualitative research consultants are who businesses, government agencies, and political candidates hire to listen for them. When they want to know what people think about their products, platforms, logos, or ad campaigns, they call a “qual.” The gold standard for conducting qualitative research has for decades been to conduct a series of focus groups, but at the QRCA conference, it was clear the trend now is toward quicker and cheaper approaches that depend more on technology than inviting people to sit around a table and share their views.

  The conference’s exhibition hall was packed with vendors selling products that promised to reveal people’s opinions, motivations, beliefs, and desires without having to listen to them. One booth had a Google Glass–type of biometric device that tracked physical signs of arousal like pupil dilation, body temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate. There was also a computer program where users could drag and drop images to express how they felt about a product or service. Kitten, good. Snake, bad.

  In one of the conference’s breakout sessions, a millennial with a nose ring gave a presentation on how to use apps like Tinder, Snapchat, and Couchsurfing for qualitative research. She coached us on how to use social media to reel in subjects to answer questions about, say, feminine hygiene products or frozen dinners. As part of her PowerPoint presentation, she showed us her own Tinder profile. As is typical on Tinder, her profile picture was an enhanced version of reality. And she was astride a motorcycle. A woman in the audience wearing half glasses and sensible shoes asked how likely it was that anyone would swipe right if the profile picture was of an older person like her. A voice behind me muttered that there are plenty of “horned toads” on Tinder who will swipe right on anything.

  At that moment, I imagined Robert Merton, the father of focus groups, turning over in his grave. Merton, a sociologist at Columbia University, was hired by the United States Office of War Information in the 1940s to research propaganda, specifically to find out what anti-Nazi messaging would be most effective on the American people. His approach was the so-called focused interview, where he convened a small group and asked particular, probing questions and noted the responses. It proved spectacularly more effective than the previous approach, which was to bring in much larger groups of people and let them push green (like) or red (don’t like) buttons in response to more general questions.

  For example, while it was thought that portraying the Nazis as bloodthirsty savages would make people want to go to war, the opposite was true. People pushed the red button. Through focused interviews, Merton was able to find out it was because people worried our boys would be slaughtered by the Nazi heathens. What he found would really rally the public was messaging that emphasized America’s values such as honor, democracy, and rationality.

  It wasn’t long before corporate America and advertisers got wind of Merton’s magic.* One of the earliest examples of how focus groups shaped a product is Betty Crocker cake mixes, which originally contained powdered egg. All you had to do was add water. But the mixes weren’t catching on with American housewives. A focus group in the 1950s found out why—the women said they felt guilty because the mixes were too easy.

  So, General Mills, which owned the Betty Crocker brand, reformulated its mixes, leaving out eggs to give homemakers more of a role in the baking process. Having to crack some eggs as well as add water made it feel like more of an honest effort. It didn’t hurt that the fresh eggs made the cake fluffier, but still, it took listening to consumers in a focus group to bring about the change.

  In no time, focus groups came to determine the look, shape, and content of many of the products on store shelves. They still have an enormous influence on product development, how services are delivered, and what television shows and movies we get to watch. Political candidates use focus groups to decide what issues to champion and how to part their hair.

  Today, though, decisions are increasingly made based on big data. The trend has been away from qualitative research methodologies like focus groups and toward more quantitative approaches, such as online analytics, social media monitoring, and telecom tracking. This is in part because of the explosion of available online and consumer data from both public and private sources. But it’s also because focus groups are expensive, typically costing $5,000–$9,000 per group. Moreover, it’s getting harder to recruit so-called virgin focus group participants. Focus groups have become so ubiquitous that there are individuals who have made a side hustle out of giving their opinions, getting paid $50–$100 for two hours of opining (plus free granola bars and peanut M&Ms).

  A screening process is supposed to prevent anyone from serving on more than one focus group within a six-month period. But people lie. “If they ask you something off-the-wall, like ‘Have you purchased a treadmill in the past year?,’ say yes; they wouldn’t ask if that weren’t [sic] the answer they wanted,” wrote one veteran focus group participant in an online how-to. His record was four focus groups in one week.

  And yet, flawed as focus groups are, marketing and advertising executives told me listening, even to a “focus groupie,” can often be more illuminating than a spreadsheet of numbers. Ironically, even technolo
gy companies that sell data hold focus groups to find out how to better serve their customers. As one marketing executive at a financial services firm in Boston put it, “The great advantage of focus groups is you get to listen to actual responses instead of seeing a checked box or unexplained click on a link.”

  I sat through several focus groups, and it was fascinating how quickly the participants forgot they were being observed from behind a two-way mirror. They checked their teeth, fixed their hair, and made pouty faces at their reflections, never mind that I and at least a half dozen advertising and marketing people were watching and, admittedly, trying not to laugh.

  More important, the participants were as unselfconscious when they discussed topics ranging from public utilities to underarm antiperspirants. Despite my strong suspicion that some of the participants were old hands at the process (like the guy who asked a woman to get out of his usual seat), I never left a focus group without feeling I had learned something relevant to selling the product or service in question.

  But how much I learned was entirely dependent on the moderator. Some of the moderators I watched were breathtakingly bad listeners—interrupting, sometimes mocking, asking leading questions, or no questions when participants gave clear indications they had more to say. I imagine these were the kinds of moderators who led the focus groups before the rollouts of such product flops as New Coke, Cheetos lip balm, and Harley-Davidson perfume. Other moderators, though, were virtuosic in their ability to listen and elicit information. They were the ones who coaxed the timid out of their shells and bridled the blowhards so the anecdotes and insights flowed.

  Which brings me to Naomi. To the rest of the world, she’s Naomi Henderson. But in the qualitative research community, she has first-name status like Beyoncé, Rihanna, Cher, and Madonna. As she moved through the QRCA conference in Arizona, people would stop mid-sentence and elbow one another. “It’s Naomi,” they’d whisper out of the corners of their mouths. Attendees crowded around asking her to sign dog-eared copies of her self-published book, Secrets of a Master Moderator.

  At seventy-six, Naomi has been moderating focus groups for nearly fifty years and, worldwide, is still possibly the most sought-after moderator, either to lead focus groups or train others to be moderators. People in the qualitative research field tell you they attended Naomi’s RIVA Training Institute in Rockville, Maryland, with an air of superiority similar to how someone else might tell you they attended Harvard or Yale.

  Tall and striking-looking with dyed auburn hair and amber eyes, Naomi moderated the focus groups that determined the looks of the modernized Aunt Jemima and the American Express centurion. Her questioning led to the Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan “We Do Chicken Right!” and informed Bill Clinton’s operatives that voters were put off when he played up his Southern accent when he first ran for president.

  “Here Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar, attended an Ivy League school, and he was the governor of Arkansas, and the focus groups wanted to know what part of that made him want to pretend to sound like a country guy who chews straw and drinks beer and drives a pickup truck,” Naomi told me in her velvety, deep voice. “The people in the groups said, ‘We don’t need someone we can relate to, we’d rather have someone we can look up to.’”

  Spend time with Naomi and you notice how easily she connects with people. Whether talking to a high-profile client or a checker at Trader Joe’s, she has an uncanny ability to shift her frame of reference to see things as they would. It’s a skill born of moderating six thousand focus groups, including ones comprised of prostitutes, men who have had reverse vasectomies, housewives who obsessively clean their homes, women who have had two stillborn children, tax cheats, and guys who drive monster trucks. In all, she’s professionally listened to more than fifty thousand people.

  One of her greatest talents is asking questions that don’t rob people of their stories. For example, when moderating a focus group for a grocery store chain that wanted to find out what motivates people to shop late at night, she didn’t ask participants what would seem like the most obvious questions: “Do you shop late at night because you didn’t get around to it during the day?” “Is it because stores are less crowded at night?” “Do you like to shop late because that’s when stores restock their shelves?” All are logical reasons to shop at night and likely would have gotten affirmative responses had she asked.

  Nor did Naomi simply ask why they shopped late at night because, she told me, “Why?” tends to make people defensive—like they have to justify themselves. Instead, Naomi turned her question into an invitation: “Tell me about the last time you went to the store after 11:00 p.m.” A quiet, unassuming woman who had said little up to that point raised her hand. “I had just smoked a joint and was looking for a ménage à trois—me, Ben, and Jerry,” she said. Insights like that are why people hire Naomi.

  Born a mixed-race child in Louisiana in the 1940s, her father was Joseph Henry Hairston, the first African American helicopter pilot in the United States Army. Because of his military service, Naomi attended fourteen different elementary schools before she was ten. And after that, she was one of seven black children who integrated her Washington, D.C., middle school in the 1950s. “I feel my childhood trained me for my career,” Naomi said. “I had to learn to easily establish rapport with people.” Being the new kid and, later, the kid who was the object of protests, she said, taught her how to “listen and size people up pretty quick.”

  Naomi told me this while we were seated at the dining room table in her colonial-style home in Rockville. It was raining outside, and the water I tracked in was quickly dispatched with a Swiffer, another product Naomi’s moderating skills helped shape. Swiffers are a popular line of cleaning products based on the “razor-and-blades” model where customers buy the long mop-like handle and then have to keep buying the disposable cleaning cloths that go on them. “I didn’t create Swiffers, but I was there at the birthing,” said Naomi.

  Swiffers sprang in part from a focus group of so-called super cleaners, women for whom a clean house was not only “next to Godliness” but also a measure of being a good wife and mother. As Naomi encouraged these women to talk about their lives and cleaning rituals, one participant mentioned she felt guilty when she used paper towels instead of cloth rags that she could wash and reuse. Guilty? Naomi wanted to know more about that. The woman explained that to make herself feel less wasteful, she saved “lightly used” paper towels—the ones she used to dry her hands, pat down lettuce, or wipe up water splashed on the counter—and at the end of the day, she threw the damp towels on the floor and used her foot to mop up any accumulated grime. The other women in the focus group chimed in that they did the same thing. “And that led to a paper towel on a stick,” Naomi said, aka the Swiffer.

  * * *

  Naomi’s mantra is: “What matters in life cannot be counted.” She has nothing against quantitative methods, which she’s used many times for clients, usually in the form of surveys. But those experiences taught her that it takes “a whole lot of listening” and not just tallying numbers to understand people’s quirky feelings, habits, and motivations. A survey or poll couldn’t have predicted that homemakers’ skating around on damp paper towels to assuage their guilt would give rise to a half-billion-dollar brand sold in fifteen countries. “If you poll enough people, then you can tell a story; it’s not the truth, it’s just a story,” Naomi said. The power of qualitative research—the power of listening—is that it explains the numbers and possibly reveals how the numbers come up short. Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches may not get you the whole truth, Naomi said, but you will get a “truer truth.”

  That’s also the view of Matthew Salganik, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, who is affiliated with several of Princeton’s interdisciplinary research centers, including the Center for Information Technology Policy and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. He wrote about the limitations of big data in his book, Bit by Bit: So
cial Research in the Digital Age. He explained to me that, broadly speaking, the difficulty with looking for answers in data sets is you become like a drunk looking for his keys under a lamppost. Ask the drunk why he’s looking for his keys under the lamppost, and the drunk says, “Because that’s where the light is.” Data sets shed light only on what’s in the data set.

  This means that algorithms, which are derived from data sets, are similarly limited. Go back and look at Charles Darwin’s wide-ranging reading list and you can imagine that had he made buying decisions based on Amazon’s algorithmic recommendations, we might not have On the Origin of Species. In addition to many books pertaining to zoology and titles like Thomas Malthus’s Population and Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Darwin also read French studies on the influence of prostitution on morals and public hygiene, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare’s works, and novels by Jane Austen. He was following the threads of his own idiosyncratic and unpredictable interests, which fed his creativity and informed his scientific output. Darwin was human, and humans will surprise you. Our ways of thinking and the paths we take in life are hard to fathom, much less forecast using a reductive formula.

  It’s a sobering lesson for companies that rely on so-called social media listening tools. These are algorithms that monitor and analyze data from sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to gauge customers’ inclinations and attitudes. Salganik told me using social media data to learn about human behavior is like learning about human behavior by watching people in a casino. They are both highly engineered environments that tell you something about human behavior, but it’s not typical human behavior.

  Listening is the opposite of algorithmic approaches. “Algorithms aspire to make guesses that will be as accurate as possible,” Salganik said. “They don’t aspire to understand.” Moreover, he said, many quantitative analysts don’t even want to know what the data is. All they want is a spreadsheet of numbers with data populating, say, the first 100 columns, so they can come up with a formula for what goes in column 101. It’s irrelevant to them what or who the data represents or the real-life problems the data might help solve. Based on his experience, Salganik said, that kind of blind approach generally doesn’t work out very well: “I think the more you understand about what you’re doing, the better the statistical model you will build, and if you actually really, deeply understand the people represented by the data, it will probably work even better.” In other words, even in the era of abundant data, we need to listen to get to understanding.