Robert Trivers gives an extraordinary example of a case where an animal having conscious access to its own actions may be damaging to its evolutionary fitness. When a hare is being chased, it zigzags in a random pattern in an attempt to shake off the pursuer. This technique will be more reliable if it is genuinely random and not conscious, as it is better for the hare to have no foreknowledge of where it is going to jump next: if it knew where it was going to jump next, its posture might reveal clues to its pursuer. Over time, dogs would learn to anticipate these cues – with fatal consequences. Those hares with more self-awareness would tend to die out, so most modern hares are probably descended from those that had less self-knowledge. In the same way, humans may be descended from ancestors who were better at the concealment of their true motives. It is not enough to conceal them from others – to be really convincing, you also have to conceal them from yourself.
I think Robert Trivers is right in his theory of self-deception; if he were not, our job as advertisers would be much easier than it is. We could just ask people why they did things or whether they would buy them, and they would reply honestly: ‘No I wouldn’t normally pay $4.65 for a coffee, but if you put a fancy green logo on a paper cup so I could display it to everybody as I walk into the office then I might just be interested . . .’ In reality, no one will ever tell you that.
The late David Ogilvy, one of the greats of the American advertising industry and the founder of the company I work for, apparently once said, ‘The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.’* Trivers and Kurzban explained the evolutionary science behind that conundrum: we simply don’t have access to our genuine motivations, because it is not in our interest to know. Here’s Ogilvy’s contemporary, Bill Bernbach:
‘Human nature hasn’t changed for a million years. It won’t even change in the next million years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about the changing man. A communicator must be concerned with the unchanging man – what compulsions drive him, what instincts dominate his every action, even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him.’
Years ago, in an interview on online book-buying for a client, a young man told me something surprisingly honest. ‘Look, to be frank, I don’t like reading novels all that much, but I find if you have read a few Ian McEwan [novels] you can pull a much better class of girl.’ Such candour about our deeper motives is rare.*
Human self-deception makes our job difficult for another reason: no one wants to believe in its existence, and it is something which people seem only to accept at a shallow, theoretical level.* People are much more comfortable attributing the success of a business to superior technology or better supply-chain management than to an unconscious, unspoken human desire.
Perhaps that’s because we patently need a level of self-delusion to function as a social species.* Imagine a world where we had no capacity for deception, and where people on dates directly asked prospective partners about their earning power and career prospects, without even pretending to be interested in their personalities. Where would we be then?*
Evolution does not care about objectivity – it only cares about fitness.
If it helps us to perceive the world in a distorted fashion, then evolution will limit our objectivity. The standard, naïve view, as Trivers observes, is to assume that evolution has given us senses which deliver an accurate view of the world. However, evolution cares nothing for accuracy and objectivity: it cares about fitness. I may know rationally a snake is harmless, but instinctively I’m still unnerved by the slithery bastards.
It isn’t easy to get people to accept the idea of hidden motivations. After all, cat lovers might realise that their pet tends to get more affectionate when it is hungry, but good luck getting them to believe that their beloved moggy is only faking affection to get food. Nevertheless, we would all benefit if we learn to accept the fact that our unconscious motivations and feelings may have remarkably little to do with the reasons we attribute to them.
Remember the airline and the cucumber sandwiches? Just as we infer a great deal about an air carrier from their on-board catering, while neglecting to care about the $150m aircraft or the make of the engines, we are just as likely to be unhappy with a hospital because the reception area is neglected, the magazines are out of date and the nurse didn’t spare us much time. In truth, the UK’s National Health Service might benefit from ‘wasting’ a bit more money on signalling, while the US healthcare sector could probably benefit from spending a lot less. It is fine to provide up-to-date magazines in reception to show that you care, but when the urge to show commitment to patients involves performing unnecessary tests and invasive surgery, it probably needs to be reined back.
Research will never tell you this; if surveyed, we would insist that the objective health measures are all we care about, and we would believe what we are saying. But the truth is that ancillary details have a far greater effect on our emotional response, and hence our behaviour, than measured outcomes. Consider these contrasting statements: ‘She died yesterday, but I must say the hospital was wonderful.’ Or ‘No, Dad’s fine. No thanks to that bloody hospital, mind. He was kept waiting four days for his operation.’ Objectively, the UK NHS provides very good medical outcomes for the money spent on it; the sad result is that we don’t like it any more than we would enjoy a flight on a brand new airliner whose sandwiches were starting to curl.
For a business to be truly customer-focused, it needs to ignore what people say. Instead it needs to concentrate on what people feel.
Let me give you an example of how ignoring what people say can be creatively liberating. Like the question of how we assess hospitals and medical care, it concerns the question of emotional misattribution; the fact is that, while we know how we feel, we cannot accurately explain why. Nature cares a great deal about feelings, and feelings largely drive what we do, but they do not come with explanations attached – because we are often better off not knowing them.
What we think about how we feel may have little to do with our real reasons for feeling it, so it pays often to ask naïve questions to which the answers seem completely self-evident. ‘Why do people go to restaurants?’, say. ‘Because they are hungry,’ comes the answer. But if you think about it a little, someone merely hungry could satisfy their urge to eat far more economically elsewhere. Restaurants are only peripherally about food: their real value lies in social connection, and status.*
It’s interesting that, once we leave childhood, we stop asking these apparently childish questions. Try this exercise, which starts with a childish question, but one that might not have been asked before: Why don’t people like being made to stand on overcrowded trains?* I once asked this question in a meeting with a rail company. Everyone looked nonplussed; I mean, it’s obvious that standing has to be worse than sitting, right? Maybe so. But why? And if standing is always worse than sitting, why do people standing on trains regularly continue to stand after seats become available? There could be a whole variety of reasons but, fascinatingly, passengers themselves do not really know, even if they are able to supply plausible post-rationalisations. But asking this question more broadly might lead to interesting new railway carriage designs that nobody has yet thought of, or it might be solved by differential pricing. We don’t know yet.
So let’s ask again – why might people hate standing on trains? Is it about feeling cheated? After all, you’ve paid for a seat on the train, and the rail company has taken your money and not given you a seat. Is that it? In which case, might you try offering standing-only carriages for shorter rail and tube journeys? People using them could be refunded part of their fare, or rewarded with points towards free journeys. Would they feel happy then? We could find out.
Or perhaps it’s because it is tiring; it’s not just about having to stand, it’s also about having to keep your balance. Or that, once
you have to hold on to a pole to stay upright, you can no longer use a mobile phone, read a book or newspaper or drink a coffee, so the journey becomes boring. If these are the reasons, then a series of bum-rests might help.* Perhaps it’s because they have nowhere to put their bags or they are paranoid about people stealing from their backpack.§§§ Maybe though, it’s more a question of status; the people who have a seat have a view, control of their personal space and space for their bags – while the people who stand get nothing. There is no story they can tell themselves about their predicament that puts it in a better light. But this raises an interesting question: what if there were some benefits to standing? In other words, is there a role for alchemy?
Imagine if commuter rail carriages were designed with the seats down the middle, with places for passengers to stand down each side, next to the windows. People sitting might have cup-holders but nothing else; people standing would have a view out of the window, a cushion to rest against and a shelf for a bag or a laptop, with two USB charging sockets. Now there would be some clear advantages to standing over sitting, to a point where standing could be perceived – by others and by oneself – as a choice rather than a compromise.*
Plans such as this only emerge when people ask a dumb question with an open mind. The commuter knows he hates standing, but he does not really know why; if you ask him, he will demand more seats, but the only way to provide them is through the huge expense of running more trains. The reason we do not ask basic questions is because, once our brain provides a logical answer, we stop looking for better ones; with a little alchemy, better answers can be found.
Part 1: On the Uses and Abuses of Reason
SOMETHING CLEARLY WENT WRONG with food in both Britain and America between the 1950s and the 1980s: it came to be considered to be more about convenience than pleasure. It seems astonishing now, but the predictions of the future I read as a child assumed that meals would be replaced by parcels of nutrients consumed in handy tablet form – it was for some reason thought that the purpose of food was to provide the necessary minerals, vitamins, protein and energy, and that the job of the food industry was to supply them in as efficient a form possible.
Some forward-thinking people had defined food’s function narrowly, in order to create a rational model of what the food industry should do.* In this focus on scale and efficiency, people lost sight of what food is for; while it is, of course, a form of nourishment, it also serves a host of other ends. The proponents of delivering food in pill form had lost sight of the fact that it is enjoyable to eat and a necessary prop at social occasions.* Even if such pills could be produced, it is perfectly plausible that people who ate only such food would be utterly miserable.
In many ways it is the very inefficiency of premium foods that gives them their emotional value. The sourdough bread beloved of hipsters is insanely slow and inefficient to produce. Likewise it is absurd for the French to have so many local varieties of cheese, and yet this variety and scarcity seems to add to our pleasure. Contrast it with the US cheese industry thirty years ago – which was fabulously efficient and centred on a small number of states. In the 1990s there seemed to be only two varieties of cheese, a yellow one and an orange one, and neither was much good. Similarly, before the recent revolution in craft beer, the range and quality of American beer was dismal;* however, since American brewing has become magnificently diverse and inefficient, the US has gone from being the worst country for a beer drinker to visit, to the best.*
Food has become remarkably inefficient, and the pill-promoting futurists of the 1960s would be astonished to see how wrong they were. People spend hours preparing it, eating it and watching television programmes about it. People cherish local ingredients, and willingly pay a premium for foods produced without chemical fertilisers. By contrast, when we made the food industry logical, we lost sight of the reasons we value food at all.
Using this as a metaphor, I would like to see the improvement we have enjoyed in food over the last three decades applied to other fields. It is only when we abandon a narrow logic and embrace an appreciation of psycho-logical value, that we can truly improve things. Once we are honest about the existence of unconscious motivations, we can broaden our possible solutions. It will free us to open up previously untried spaces for experimentation in resolving practical problems if we are able to discover what people really, really want,* rather than a) what they say they want or b) what we think they should want.
1.1: The Broken Binoculars
For the last fifty years or so, most issues involving human behaviour or decision-making have been solved by looking through what I call ‘regulation-issue binoculars’. These have two lenses – market research and economic theory – that together are supposed to provide a complete view of human motivation. There’s only one problem: the binoculars are broken. Both the lenses are pretty badly cracked, and they distort our view of every issue.
The first lens is market research or, to give it a simpler name, asking people. However, the problem with it is that, if we remember David Ogilvy’s words: ‘The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.’ People simply do not have introspective access to their motivations. The second lens is standard economic theory, which doesn’t ask people what they do and doesn’t even observe what they do. Instead it assumes a narrow and overly ‘rationalistic’ view of human motivation, by focusing on a theoretical, one-dimensional conception of what it believes humans are trying to do. Again, behavioural economics has shown that it provides an incomplete and sometimes misleading view of human behaviour – neither the business nor the policy worlds have paid sufficient attention to the failings of economics and research. Why might this be?
Generally, it is safe for anyone making business or policy decisions to act as though everything seen through these binoculars is accurate – not least because everyone else they work with – and everyone who might hire, promote or fire them – sees the world through the same binoculars.
‘The economic model told me to do it’ is the twenty-first-century equivalent of ‘I was only following orders,’ an attempt to avoid blame by denying the responsibility for one’s actions. Sometimes the old binoculars work well, of course: quite often people can accurately describe their motivations, and a large part of human behaviour is perfectly consistent with economic theory. Logic and psycho-logic do overlap frequently, as you would expect.
However, we still need a new set of lenses; as I explained at the beginning of the book, stubborn problems are probably stubborn because they are logic-proof. In other cases, the old binoculars provide a view that is so distorted, a field of view so narrow, that they blind us to far simpler creative solutions. The broken binoculars assume that the way to improve travel is to make it faster, that the way to improve food is to make it cheaper and that the way to encourage environmentally friendly behaviour is to convert people into passionate environmentalists. All these ideas are sometimes true – but not always.
Any new binocular lenses provided by sciences such as behavioural economics and evolutionary psychology will not be flawless, but they can at least provide us with a wider field of view. All progress involves guesswork, but it helps to start with a wide range of guesses. The following is a simple example of how a new lens can allow you to see (and solve) problems from a more psycho-logical perspective.
One of our clients at Ogilvy Change is a large energy provider who arranges appointments with customers for engineers to repair or service their central heating boilers. The appointments are scheduled either for the morning or for the afternoon – it is difficult to be any more precise than this, since it is hard to predict how long each visit may take. Customers complain about this, their most common refrain being, ‘I had to take the whole day off work.’ What these customers say they want is a one-hour appointment window. However, if you were to take their demands literally and attempt such a level of precision, it
would cost a fortune and there would be a risk of disappointment whenever circumstances prevented an engineer from delivering on the promise. The more astute of you may also have noticed that the one-hour appointment window would not necessarily solve the problem of ‘having to take a day off work’ – if your appointment was between 1pm and 2pm, for instance, unless you worked a short distance from home, you’d still have to take a day off work to be available.
Our first recommendation to the client was to listen to what consumers said, but to interpret it laterally rather than literally. People clearly found something about the length of the appointment window annoying, but maybe it was the degree of uncertainty involved in waiting for the engineer to show up rather than the length of the appointment window. Anyone who has waited at home for five hours for an engineer knows that it’s a form of mental torture, a little like being under house arrest; you can’t have a bath or pop out for a pint of milk, because you fear that the second you do, the engineer will turn up. So you spend half the day on tenterhooks, afraid that your engineer might not show up at all. How different might the experience feel if the engineer agreed to text you half an hour before showing up at your door? Suddenly you’d be free to get on with your day almost as if it were a day off, with your only obligation being to keep an eye on your phone.* This is one of the solutions we propose to test. Is it as good as offering one-hour appointments? Not quite, but it might offer 90 per cent of the emotional and perceptual improvements, at 1 per cent of the cost. The old binoculars would not have revealed this because they would have taken customer complaints literally.
My colleague Christopher Graves, who founded the Ogilvy Center for Behavioral Change in New York, calls this approach ‘asking the real why’. People may be accurate commentators on their emotional state, but the causes of that emotional state (in this case, uncertainty) are often a complete mystery to them. If the experiment works, and early indications are positive, we have performed a form of alchemy, using psycho-logic to conjure up value from nowhere. Experimentation is the only reliable way of testing, so we measure the effect of engineers’ texts on customer satisfaction against a control group who receive no such early warning.
Alchemy Page 5