Technology and psychology: The ideal match

Debates over market research technologies can seem to the weary observer to come down to a battle between Technophiles and Technophobes. The Technophiles announce that change – make that “disruptive” change – is inevitable and research companies need to get ahead of it or go extinct. The Technophobes – nobody said these descriptions would be fair – tend to proclaim that the fundamentals of research are unchanged and that new firms don’t pay them enough attention. “What about the norms?” howl the Technophobes, but the Technophiles are too busy trying to work out how to do surveys on Oculus Rift or come up with an Ello brand strategy.

At this point it would be easy to describe a third way that marries the rigour of the older methodologies with the ease and potential of new technologies. But that’s not really the point. At BrainJuicer I hope we’re no Technophobes but the point we’d make is that the entire question is misconceived. The important question isn’t whether or not research keeps up with technology, it’s whether or not research keeps up with psychology.

If you believe research has a good grasp of how human decision making works and methods that take it into account, then by all means implement those methods on whichever gear best enables it. If, on the other hand, you believe research really hasn’t got much of a grip on those things, the problems you need to solve go way deeper than just what technology you should use. The risk of technology isn’t what it destroys, it’s what it keeps. New technology can disrupt old ways of collecting data, but unthinkingly continue all the bad assumptions encoded in those old ways. Think of a company, for instance, that promises automated, rapid-deployment surveys with quick results – if the survey template relies on creaky and unreliable metrics like “purchase intent” you’re no better off going the fast or slow route. Whether technology changes norms doesn’t matter very much if what the norms measured wasn’t useful in the first place.

When technology and psychology work hand in hand, though, the results can be truly insightful.

Take one of those bad assumptions I mentioned – the idea that people are good witnesses of their own behaviour and their reasons for it. This is something qualitative research, in particular, has always understood and tried to work against. Unfortunately, the fact that most qualitative research has generally involved discussions of behaviour and attitudes that take in spaces completely removed from the actual context of those behaviours and attitudes has limited that effectiveness – and put far too much pressure on the interpretative skill (and internal biases) of the interviewers and analysts.

Ethnography offered a way around this, situating an observer in someone’s daily life and letting them see choices and activities in a context. But traditional ethnography is intensely time-consuming, hard to scale, and expensive. Here’s where technology steps in – smartphones allow mobile ethnography, where people record their own environment and behavioural context and analysts can then interpret it. BrainJuicer’s Mobile Moments of Truth™ is one of several mobile ethnography offerings in the research space that take advantage of smartphones to make qualitative research a lot more scalable and contextually rich. A project can include dozens of participants over two or three weeks – much like an online community – and focuses on capturing visual evidence of behaviour, both in the form of recording or photographing it and in video diaries describing it. So the traditional qual modes of analysis – like body language and linguistic analysis – can be preserved.

The frame of analysis we use in mobile ethnography is strongly rooted in our overall approach to human behaviour, which is to look at the context of a decision and look for ways to change the decision by influencing that context. We concentrate on three sets of factors – environmental (the way the decision is presented and the environment it takes place in), social (what other people are deciding) and personal (internal forces like emotion and common cognitive biases).

Different factors are critical for solving different client problems, but Mobile Moments of Truth give us insight into all three. For instance, when a cosmetics client wanted to move their brand more upscale, we focused on the personal side of behaviour – the specific moments where people felt good or inhibited during the buying and using process. When a food and drink company wanted to understand in-home entertaining, social factors proved particularly useful – how generosity, reciprocity and other kinds of social heuristics work in a party environment. And when a condom manufacturer wanted to understand women’s attitudes to condom use and sexual health, focusing on the environment around sexual decisions proved more insightful than any direct address would have been.

By using a framework that moves the focus away from the decider and onto the decision – and its context – we can unlock the true potential of technology to act as a witness to behaviour and a genuine accelerator of research.

Let’s not continue to resist methodological progress on the altar of best practice and norms but, equally, don’t think new technology will help one little bit unless it’s used in conjunction with a valid model of consumer behaviour. Breakthrough technologies such as mobile can act as a catalyst for more meaningful change. As an industry, we missed this opportunity once before, taking our incorrect questions off the phone and asking them online. Let’s not let it happen again!

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(Feature image courtesy of Cat Branchman.)