“Everybody lies. People lie about how many drinks they had on the way home. They lie about how often they go to the gym, how much those new shoes cost, whether they read that book. They call in sick when they’re not. They say they’ll be in touch when they won’t. They say it’s not about you when it is. They say they love you when they don’t. They say they’re happy while in the dumps. They say they like women when they really like men. People lie to friends. They lie to bosses. They lie to kids. They lie to parents. They lie to doctors. They lie to husbands. They lie to wives. They lie to themselves. And they damn sure lie to surveys.” Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.
A few weeks ago, a colleague was explaining to me an experiment in quantum physics, known as the slit experiment.
This experiment involved passing light through a plate with slits, and found that electrons behaved differently when they were being observed. As if they knew they were being watched. A bit of googling confirmed the validity of what my colleague said, but it was too much for me to get my head around. The takeout was that at the quantum physics level, setting out to measure things effects your result. It literally changes the nature of reality.
The act of observing changes the behaviour. Amazing.
Which is a lot like market research. We act differently if we are being watched.
You see, people aren’t always honest when completing surveys and polls. For a variety of reasons, put a survey in front of us, and there is a reasonable chance we will give you back a highly massaged version of the truth (I am being polite). If these answers are central to your election strategy, or rollout of a new product or advertising campaign, then you are potentially about to back the wrong horse, costing you valuable time, money, and more.
As odd as it sounds, researchers in Britain asked people if they told the truth on surveys. 80% said they did, while 20% admitted they told ‘porkies’. But how can we trust the 80%? Are the 20% who admit to being dishonest actually the only honest ones? Does 20% of the 80% also lie? And were the 20% who admitted to lying, actually lying?
And of course, no one actually believes others will be truthful anyway, with only 9% saying they trusted published polls.
It’s enough to make your head explode.
So why would people give less than truthful answers, especially when most surveys are (theoretically) anonymous? Over the years, this question has occupied the thoughts of many academics, researchers and data scientists. Between them they have proposed many different theories, but the main ones seem to revolve around these 8 key themes:
- Increasing self-worth by exaggerating or inflating responses.Hands up if you always put yourself in a slightly higher income bracket (or a lower age bracket)!
- Providing socially desirable answers.This phenomenon has brought many political campaigns unstuck, with respondents likely to understate the extent to which they actually support a person or policy they know to be unpopular, or overstate the extent to which they engage in healthy, environmentally conscious behaviour.
- Being defensive about sensitive topics. Respondents are more likely to lie about sensitive issues such as drugs, religion, or personal finance.
- Providing an answer that will ‘please’ the interviewer. For example, telling a company that their new product is attractive, even if it isn’t. (Maybe that’s how the AU Ford Falcon was allowed to be launched). Research participants are often just trying to help, or to make a good impression, and sometimes that leads them to say what they think an interviewer wants to hear, especially if the company is paying an incentive to complete the survey, or is putting on a fully catered focus group!
- Trying to drive a desirable personal outcome. For example, saying that you wouldn’t spend more $10 for a product when you would actually pay $20, in the hope of driving down the launch price.
- Genuinely forgetting the past, can lead some to reinvent history.
- Being hurried, annoyed, or malicious. If the survey cause frustration because it is so long or poorly designed, respondents may provide any answer just to get through to the end. Or, if they have a particular axe to grind with a brand, they may deliberately set out to sabotage the results by providing misleading answers.
- Not being able to predict the future. Predicting how you will actually behave in the future, in a given set of circumstances, can be fraught. Would you actually buy that electric car, or will budget realities force you into a second-hand gas guzzler?
There is a perceivable disconnect between what people do, and what they say they do, which is why sometimes it is better to rely on observed behaviours rather than survey data.
Steve Jobs once said “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them, that’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page”.
Now don’t get me wrong, the purpose of this article wasn’t to undermine a whole industry. Rather, it was to point out how actual observed behaviours can often be a better predictor of future behaviour than stated intentions (a phenomenon also relevant to risk profiling, but that’s a story for another day).
The beating heart of Ensombl is our Q&A platform, where thousands of advice professionals are going every day to ask and answer questions, seeking to solve the actual real-life challenges they face in their practices right now. Any insights we gain from this are based on actual behaviours, rather than the questionable responses to some survey.
As a barometer of the ‘zeitgeist’ in advice, and the issues that are keeping advisors awake at night, it’s likely to be bang-on.
Actions speak louder than words, after all.
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