There are
two sides to what we do at the think tank where I work. One is academic – we’re
very involved in understanding culture – what it is, how it works, how it shapes
our worldview, and how it drives our decisions and choices. This is the heavy
and intricate stuff we write up for journals and present at conferences.
The other
side is pragmatic. Rather than chase grants, we fund our research by
working for the private sector. We know a lot about how people in groups make
decisions. As in how they find value in products, services, themes, and ideas –
and what consumers have to see and hear in order to recognize those values intuitively.
We’ve advised everyone from theme parks, universities, retail chains,
advertising agencies , marketing directors, and new product development to government
agencies such as NASA.
We can do this
because our expertise isn’t a specific product category. Our expertise is human
behavior, particularly in groups.
Working the
commercial sector also gives us another particular advantage. The social
sciences get their data from surveys and controlled lab experiments. We have
real-world data – masses of it – about what people actually DO, rather than
what they say they do.
This is an
important distinction because if neuroscience has proven anything over the past
twenty years, it is that people can’t tell you what they want with any degree
of accuracy – but know it when they see it with 100% accuracy. People can’t reliably
respond to surveys because taking a survey or sitting in a lab occurs in a
different context than when you make a real decision.
Participants
can guess what they will do based on their memory of similar experiences, but
they won’t really know until they are faced with the actual decision in context.
Even then, the
buy decision is made in their subconscious. They won’t know what they
want until their conscious mind gets the message. Only then does their
conscious come into play, conjuring up a logical rationalization why they want it emotionally - and that
reason may or may not have anything to do with why their subconscious selected
it.
Many people
seem to have a problem accepting these findings. Two thousand years of Western culture,
philosophy, and just plain thinking about thinking—from the ancient Jewish and Greek
philosophers to Christianity, the Enlightenment, psychoanalysis, existentialism, all the way up to to postmodernist thought—don’t just vanish because of something as trivial as
inconvenient facts.
The
philosopher René Descartes attempted to prove his existence as a thinking being
by thinking, summed up as Cogito ergo sum—I
think therefore I am.
Everything
that makes us unique individuals exists only in our mind. What we see
in the mirror every morning—our body—is just the physical support system for
the mind. Who we are and what we “mean” only exists so long as our mind can
generate and retain memory. That’s why
the most fearful disease for seniors is not cancer, but Alzheimer’s. It slowly
destroys every vestige of your memory of your sense of self, leaving only the
physical shell. The body is there, but
the individual isn’t.
As Americans, we think of every individual as unique, but it is collectively as a species that we are truly unique. According to
Dr. Yuval Noah Harari of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the unique
thing about human beings—the key aspect that distinguishes us radically from
other animals and allows us to create large complex social organizations—is
that we can create, hold, and share beliefs about things that do not exist or
cannot be empirically demonstrated. In
other words, to paraphrase Lewis Carroll’s White Queen, we can believe as many
as six impossible things before breakfast.
We can imagine,
and believe, logical impossibilities – concepts we cannot objectively prove:
myths, legends, gods, dreams, hope, and religion. We can create belief in
abstractions such as money—the only belief system with total acceptance
worldwide—and credit (from the Latin credo – belief). We can create worlds that
do not even exist yet, such as alternative visions of the future. We can create
a shared mindset with others that transcends family, tribe, clan, or nation.
What truly demonstrates the uniqueness of humans as distinct from other primates, Harari maintains, is that you could never
convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him a limitless banana supply
after his death, in monkey heaven.
Not only can
we think impossible things, we can share them with others. In 1961 President
John F. Kennedy announced the national goal of "landing a man on the moon
and returning him safely to the earth" by the end of decade. Millions of
people believed it was going to happen, including the scientists and engineers
who later admitted they set to work with no reasonable idea of how it could be
done. Because they believed – against all empirical evidence – that they could
do it, all they had to do was figure out how.
Humans, like
other primates, live in an objective reality, but we have layered another
reality on top of that—what Harari calls a “fictional reality.” It’s the
ability to conjure up alternate explanations and imaginary futures – ones unsupported
by existing evidence -- that gives us emotions such as faith, hope, and
curiosity, and outcomes like religion and science.
Not only can
we imagine them, we can believe them to be true even when we can’t prove it. These imagined futures sustain everything we do
as we move through life: marriage, children, education, investing, innovation, and faith.
Combined
with our other abilities to read and exchange emotions, intentions, and
fictional realities among ourselves—to create a Transactional Reality— we alone
can cooperate on a massive scale and across the eons to make their own future.
And that’s
what makes us uniquely human and not just another species of clever ape.
I like this. I think (and I'm not being a wise-ass).
ReplyDeleteGreat Blog Jamie. I agree completely that research asking people to predict what they will want is pretty useless, but what research, and your work can do is predict what underlying values and needs of people are that will in fact, drive their choices, consciously or unconsciously. Thanks for posting this. Tom Nagle
ReplyDelete