We Know Less about Our Motivations than Consumer Research Commonly Supposes

We’ve seen some strange ideas about the sources of human behavior coming out in the mainstream press over the past few years. More and more it seems, our hallowed concepts of volition and self-awareness are appearing to be as much an illusion as the apparent flatness of Mother Earth.

Gary Klein’s provocative Sources of Power destroyed the Defense Department’s illusion that people under fire in the battlefield reason through their decisions. A far more insightful book on intuition than Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, Klein’s research clearly showed that when matters are urgent, the rational mind bows out while intuition takes over. But typically, after an event that was mediated by intuitive processes people will weave a scenario showing how they reasoned through their response to teh urgent matter. Retrospective rationalization, you might call it.

Klein did his research with firemen and acute care neonatal nurses, both of which are intimately familiar with urgent events. He tells of a fireground commander, we’ll call Jake, who was noted for his ESP. Time and again Jake saw things before they happened. This enabled him to give commands that more than a few times saved lives.

In one case, Jake entered a kitchen and immediately yelled to his crew to get out. Just about the time the last firemen’s legs crossed the threshold, the kitchen floor collapsed. Once more Jake’s crew was amazed at his ESP. The flames in the kitchen seemed too small to suggest a floor cave-in was imminent. However, Jake unconsciously recognized that the heat in the kitchen was much greater than it should have been for such a small fire. It could only mean that a roaring inferno in the basement was eating away at the floor structure. It was not ESP that saved the day. It was intuition that was developed from years of experience fight fires.

Klein’s research led to major changes in military training as well as in training programs for firemen and nurses. Apparently through mental imaging and other brain training techniques people’s intuition can be developed without actually living through real events.

Our egos demand obeisance to the illusion that we have full knowledge of the sources of our behavior. Most consumer research presumes that to be the case. However, brain researchers and cognitive scientists estimate that we are consciously aware of only about five percent of the mental activity that goes into our perceptions, thinking and decision-making.

I once had a woman scream at me from an audience I w2as taking through sales training, “Mr. Wolfe, you may not know why you do everything you do, but I know why I do everything I do!” That was her ego demanding full acknowledgment of her conscious autonomy. Incidentally, her sales manager called a coffee break, took her aside in the hall and relieved her of her position. Her behavior was inconsistent with what it takes to have productive team behavior, he told me.

People influence each others in teams. But they influence each other even beyond personal interaction. Research has indicated that people can influence each other out to at least three degrees of separation.

Everybody knows the 100 monkeys story. To recall: Monkeys on an island off the coast of Japan began washing sweet potatoes before eating them. After awhile, monkeys on other nearby islands began washing their tubers even though no contact appeared to have taken place between the first tuber washers and the group that later took up the practice. The researchers proposed that after a certain critical mass of users had been achieved (about when the 100^th monkey took up the practice) through some unknown means all monkeys within some range would suddenly begin washing their tubers.

While that story has been discredited, a mystery still remains over how information reaches animals – including us humans – over great distances in short bursts of time. Malcolm Gladwell examines this mystery in The Tipping Point – a much better book that his Blink.

It is truly amazing how people can self-organize around an idea or action without being told to and with no one in the group really knowing why they are doing what they are doing in participating in the organizing effort. Of course, everyone would have an answer for a researcher who asked why they were participating. But research shows that neither conscious intent nor leadership is necessary to get people on the same wavelength. Why do fads take off? When does a fad turn into a trend and why? How much is conscious intent involved in fomenting fads and trends? Those are questions Gladwell tackles in The Turning Point.

I want to talk about these sorts of things in my next post because I have been spending a great amount of time lately reading about complex adaptive systems. More and more I see in literature on that subject answers marketers have always coveted for why consumers do what they do, and how to predict their behavior.

 

Comments

[Bill]

Looking forward to your follow up. I find it amazing what people decide to latch on to without any idea of why they are doing it. The pants around the ankles phenom is a perfect example