Editor’s note: Sonya Turner is the director of insights and analysis for Denver research firm iModerate.
Psychologists from Harvard and University of Virginia released a study in the journal Science showing something that we perhaps already knew but didn’t want to believe was true: People don't like to be alone with their thoughts.
In this study, participants were left alone in a room for six to 15 minutes with no distractions and they didn’t like it. In many cases, they really didn’t like it – to the point that they gave themselves electric shocks rather than just sit there occupied by nothing but their minds.
Think about that. People would rather experience the pain of an electric shock (that they had earlier said they’d pay to avoid) than sit quietly in their own mind for a few minutes.
It’s no surprise then to read that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that when asked to recall their activities in the past 24 hours, 83 percent of Americans said they spent no time at all relaxing or thinking.
The New York Times recently looked at this as well. As the Times pointed out, we all know that being busy, tapped, overscheduled and on the go can carry a certain kind of prestige. No one dares admit that they have free time on their hands, that they enjoyed an idle hour or that there is a blank spot on their Outlook calendar. In our moment-to-moment culture, such schedule gaps suggest a certain type of weakness, a lack of initiative or even pure laziness.
Thank goodness for our smartphones, right? These trusty sidekicks remove the possibility that we will ever have downtime or need to be alone in our own heads. If we’re waiting in line, sitting in traffic or simply finding ourselves with nothing to do, we turn to our phones or tablets with such immediacy it’s become an instinct. Why sit there and ruminate when we could see what’s happening on Instagram?
It’s kind of funny, when you think about it, but is there a darker side to it, too? More than just the social pressure we feel to be “always on,” are we losing our ability to be introspective? As Giancarlo Dimaggio, a psychiatrist with the Center for Metacognitive Interpersonal Therapy in Rome told The New York Times, “Feeling what you feel is an ability that atrophies if you don’t use it.”
What this means for MR
The ramifications of this are profound and broad-reaching on a societal level but for researchers who need to get inside consumers’ heads every day it can be downright scary. Sure, people might be willing to fill their downtime by taking a survey or doing a focus group, but what will you be able to get out of them?
If people are so hell bent on avoiding introspection that they will self-administer an electric shock rather than be alone with their thoughts, how do you get consumers to give you deep, authentic answers? How do you get them to leave their comfort zone and actually go below the surface?
There does seem to be one saving grace. That same Harvard/UVA study found that people are more comfortable being alone with their thoughts if they have a plan for what to think about. And as researchers, that’s what we do … tell people what we’d like them to think about. But while this helps alleviate some of the resistance people have developed, it can’t make up entirely for the “atrophy” that has happened to so many of us.
This is where the research approach becomes critically important. Just asking questions can’t be counted on to penetrate people’s increasing resistance to spending time inside their own heads. The researcher needs to call on a host of skills and techniques to get them there – and keep them there long enough to reveal findings of importance.
We were faced with developing a research approach nearly five years ago. When we looked at moving people past the surface by developing our proprietary cognitive approach called ThoughtPath, we focused on the struggle consumers have when asked to articulate things like why or how they decided to purchase a particular item. By using an artful approach with one of three particular elements of cognitive theory – experience, perception and identity – we looked to see if we could help respondents stop and think long enough to access information that was lurking in a corner of their brain.
Experience
Opening a conversation with questions that draw from experience theory can be an effective way to get the respondent in the right frame of mind. By asking people to recreate a particular moment or event, these questions ground them firmly in the relevant experiential space, which then allows them to access the attendant emotions in a more immediate, visceral way.
Perception
To access top-of-mind reactions or takeaway impressions from an ad or other type of message, various elements of perception theory come into play. These are the natural steps consumers take when processing anything. Following and understanding each stage in the process is critical. Using these elements – noticing, grouping, categorizing and inferring – researchers can walk people methodically through their natural cognitive processes to uncover the details of how they interpret messages and make decisions.
Identity
If a brand is seeking to understand the underlying power of a message, ad or other form of brand communication, developing questions based on identity theory can be particularly useful. This approach helps us look at how people define who they are and where they belong in the world, providing consumers’ attitudes toward products and brands and their purchase behavior. This critical context allows brands to increase their relevance by fine-tuning the way they connect to consumers’ sense of who they are and who they want to become.
In addition to basing questions on these three theories, careful sequencing that leads people through a natural, authentic process creates an opportunity for consumers to think back, reflect and go deeper into their own thoughts.
Judging by the findings from this recent Harvard and University of Virginia study, researchers will face an increasingly difficult task in eliciting authentic, well thought out answers from the consumers whose opinions matter so much. The differentiator will be the ability to ask the questions in ways that move people past this growing resistance to introspection, and that get them to flex those atrophied muscles and go to a place that delivers true insight.