The Challenges With Asking People What They Need
During a workshop, I asked a woman what factors she considered when buying a new pair of jeans. She didn’t hesitate to answer. She said, “Fit is my number-one factor.” I then asked her to tell me about the last time she bought a pair of jeans. She said, “I bought them on Amazon.” I asked, “How did you know they would fit?” She replied, “I didn’t, but they were a brand I liked, and they were on sale.”
What’s the difference between her two responses? Her first response tells me how she thinks she buys a pair of jeans. Her second response tells me how she actually bought a pair of jeans. This is a crucial difference. She thinks she buys a pair of jeans based on fit, but brand loyalty, the convenience of online shopping, and price (or getting a good deal) were more important when it came time to make a purchase.
This story isn’t unique. I’ve asked people these same two questions countless times in workshops. The purchasing factors often vary, but there is always a gap between the first answer and the second. These participants aren’t lying. We just aren’t very good at understanding our own behavior.
Decades of research on investigative interviewing (the kind used by journalists, lawyers, and detectives) has shown that interview participants struggle to answer direct (factual) questions accurately.22 In a witness interview, this might mean that the participant mistakes the color of the getaway car or forgets an important location. In a customer interview, this might mean that the customer misremembers when they bought something or forgets why they signed up for a particular service.
Direct questions require that we recall facts without context. This process is prone to cognitive biases—common patterns in mental errors that result from the way our brains process information.23 We are bad at quantifying how often we do something. We often speculate about what we did, when, and why. We tend to favor generalities over specifics. We give answers that are influenced more by our sense of identity rather than our actual behavior. And we tend to come up with coherent reasons to explain our behavior that are often not grounded in reality. To be clear, this behavior is a function of how our brains work and not the result of interview participants trying to deceive us. In fact, many of these biases come into play because our interview subjects are trying to be helpful.
We see these errors show up in many contexts. Physically active adults overestimate how often they work out. Countless Americans underestimate how much alcohol they drink. The majority of us think we are above-average drivers, healthy eaters, and great listeners. It gets worse. Like the woman buying jeans, we think we understand why we do the things we do. But the reality is, our brains are exceptionally good at creating coherent (but not necessarily true) stories that deceive us.
Michael Gazzaniga, a neuropsychologist at the University of California Santa Barbara, conducted a phenomenal study that shows just how effective our brains are at deceiving us.24 He constructed an experiment protocol in which split-brain patients were shown an image such that it was visible to only their left eye and asked the participant to select a related card with their left hand. Left-eye vision and left-side body movement are controlled by the right hemisphere. In a split-brain patient, the connection between the right and left hemispheres has been severed, meaning no information can cross from one hemisphere to the other. Therefore, in this protocol, the right hemisphere was doing all of the work, and the left hemisphere was unaware of what was happening.
Gazzaniga then asked participants why they chose the card that they did. Because language is processed and generated in the left hemisphere, the left hemisphere is required to respond. However, because of the protocol design, only the right hemisphere knows why the participant selected the card. As a result, Gazzaniga expected the participants to be stumped. But that isn’t what happened. Instead, every subject fabricated a response.
The left hemisphere was being asked to provide a rationalization for a behavior done by the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere didn’t know the answer. But that didn’t keep the left hemisphere from fabricating an answer. That answer, however, had no basis in reality.
Now if this study had been limited to split-brain patients, it would be interesting but not very relevant to us. It turns out split-brain patients aren’t the only ones who fabricate reasons. We all do it. Gazzaniga named this tendency to rationalize our behavior even when we can’t possibly know the reason as the “left brain interpreter,” and later studies have shown that we all have an active “left brain interpreter.”25 We need to reconcile the present with the past, and when information is missing, our brains simply fill in details that make the story coherent.
This is exactly why in Thinking, Fast and Slow, behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman claimed, “A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped.” Your brain will gladly give you an answer. That answer, however, may not be grounded in reality. In fact, Kahneman outlines dozens of ways our brains get it wrong. It’s also why Kahneman argues confidence isn’t a good indicator of truth or reality. He writes, “Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it.” Not necessarily the truth.
As long as your brain can summon a compelling reason, it will feel like the truth—even if it isn’t. Gazzaniga’s participants thought they knew why they selected the card that they did. The left-brain interpreter filled in the missing details, creating a coherent story. The participant was confident—and, unfortunately, wrong.
Gazzaniga’s study means you can’t simply ask your customers about their behavior and expect to get an accurate answer. Most will obligingly give you what sounds like a reasonable answer. But you won’t know if they are telling you about their ideal behavior or their actual behavior. Nor will you know if they are simply telling you a coherent story that sounds true but isn’t true in practice.
I learned this the hard way. Back in 2007, I worked on a product that helped corporate recruiters source candidates. At that time, the hype in the recruiting industry was around recruiting passive candidates—candidates who were currently employed but open to new opportunities. There was a belief (and probably still is today) that passive candidates were better than active candidates—those who were unemployed and ready to apply for jobs right now. Thought leaders in the recruiting space advocated for recruiting passive candidates. Every customer I talked to told me they wanted to source passive candidates. I thought we had uncovered a real need. So, we built a passive-candidate-recruiting solution. It flopped.
Corporate recruiters said they wanted to source passive candidates. It’s what their ideal selves wanted. It’s what they aspired to. But when it came time to fill an open position, they sourced active candidates again and again. Why did this happen? Because recruiters are often measured by how fast they can fill an open role, and active candidates are the fastest way to do that. Even though recruiters aspired to source passive candidates, what they actually did was source active candidates. It’s the equivalent of opening a salad bar across from a McDonald’s because customers said they wanted to eat healthier. We can’t be too surprised when our salads lose out to the Big Mac.
Our failure wasn’t due to a lack of research. It was because we asked our customers the wrong questions. We built a product based on a coherent story told by both the thought leaders in our space and by our customers themselves. But it wasn’t a story that was based in reality. If you want to build a successful product, you need to understand your customers’ actual behavior—their reality—not the story they tell themselves.
Too often in customer interviews, we ask direct questions. We ask, “What criteria do you use when purchasing a pair of jeans?” Or we ask, “How often do you go to the gym?” But these types of questions invoke our ideal selves, and they encourage our brains to generate coherent but not necessarily reliable responses. In the coming pages, you’ll learn a far more reliable method for learning about your customers’ actual behavior.