Malcolm Gladwell’s presentation at PopTech! Oct 21-23 2004 in Camden Maine

Audio file available here via IT Conversations.

[transcription beginning at 21:12/30:17]

We don’t have access to our unconscious, we don’t know what these thing are coming, where they come from that bubbles up from the recesses of our brain. So what do we do? Well, we have a behavior that we just did, we just made a decision of a certain kind, we don’t really know where it came from, so we come up with an explanation, we make up a story. And we’re really really good at making up stories. I call this The Story Telling Problem. And this is something that happens over and over again.

I spent some time when I was writing my book [ Blink] with this tennis coach Vic Brayden, and he had spent a lot time talking with world class tennis players, and one the things he noticed is that if you ask a world class tennis player how he hits a top spin forehand they will always say this, ‘Right at the moment of impact, I roll my wrist’. Well, Vic Brayden took video tapes of world class tennis players hitting top spin forehands and digitized them and broke them down to, you know, milliseconds and noticed that no one ever rolled their wrist when they hit the ball, ever, the wrist was always fixed. In fact, if you roll your wrist when you hit the ball you can’t hit a good top spin forehand. Yet all these are guys going around the country giving seminars teaching young kids how to hit a top spin forehand and saying, ‘At the critical moment or impact, you gotta roll your wrist just like that’. They had no idea. These are people who hit a top spin forehand better than anyone else in human history and yet they are fundamentally incapable of accurately describing the way in which they perform that task. And when they’re asked to describe it, what do they do? They tell a story.

Now this is a real problem, cause what it says is … that a whole assumption of this project is that we can ask people to explain what they’re feeling but then when we look at the various situations we say … that when we listen to the various stories people tell about why they think the way the do, or what they want there are no connections to reality. They’re just plucking them out of the thin air.

Problem # 3. And I think this is the most serious problems of all and that is that asking people to think about what they want causes this to change their opinion of what they want, in fact it screws up their ability to understand and recognize what they want. This problem in psychology is called the Perils of Introspection Problem, and a lot of research has been done by a guy named Tim Wilson at U.V.A and he once did this very simple experiment called the Poster Test.

And the Poster Test is you got a bunch of posters in a room, you bring in some college students in, and you say ‘pick any poster you want, take it home’. And they do that. Second group is brought in and you say, ‘pick any poster you want, tell me why you want it, and then go home’. Couple of months passes, and he calls up all the students, and he asks, “That poster you got a couple of months back, do you like it?’ and the kids, who in the first group didn’t have to explain their choice, all liked their poster. And the kids in the second group who did have to explain, now they hate their poster. And not only that, the kids who had to explain their poster picked a very different kind of poster then the kids who didn’t have to explain their poster. So making people explain what they want changes their preference and changes their preference in a negative way, it causes them to gravitate toward something they actually weren’t interested in in the first place.

Now, there’s a wonderful little detail in this – that there were two kinds of posters in the room, there where Impressionist prints and then there were these photos of, you know, kitten hanging by bars that said, ‘Hang in there baby’. And the students who were asked to explain their preference overwhelmingly chose the kitten. And the ones who weren’t asked to explain overwhelmingly chose the Impressionist poster. And they were happy with their choice obviously, who could be happy with a kitten on their wall after 3 months? Now, why is that?

Why when you ask someone to explain their preference do they gravitate toward the least sophisticated of the offerings? Cause it’s a language problem. You’re someone, you know in your heart that you prefer the Impressionists but now you have to come up with a reason for your choice, and you really don’t have the language to say why you like the Impressionist photo. What you do have the language for is to say, ‘Well, I like the kitten cause I had a kitten when I was growing up,’ and you know … so forcing you to explain something when you don’t necessarily have the vocabulary and the tools to explain your preference automatically shifts you toward the most conservative and the least sophisticated choice. Now you see this time and time again in for example, market research.

That the act of getting someone in a room and asking them to explain their preference causes them to move away from the more sophisticated, more daring, more radical ideas. The classic example is All in the Family. When the first pilot was made back in the 70s, it was taken to ABC and ABC had a big room full of people, as many people as this, and they showed them the test and they asked them to rate the pilot, asked them to rate it on a scale of 1 to 100. You need 70 to get on the air basically. This All in the Family pilot got 40. An unbelievably low score. And the comments were, ‘well, the real problem is Archie Bunker, he needs to be a little softer, more nurturing, more of a caring father.’ That was people’s response. So what did ABC do? They passed on it. Guys went to CBS, CBS tested it, did really poorly, but some guy at the top of CBS really liked it, and said, well why not, let’s just play it, they put it on the air and it was one of the most lucrative sitcom franchises in the history of television. So what does this mean?

Does this mean we can’t trust people at all? Maybe. What is really means though is that there is a class of products that are difficult for people to interpret. Some things really are ugly and when we say that they’re ugly they really are ugly and we’re always gonna think their ugly. They’re never going to be beautiful. But there’s another class of products which we see and we don’t really know what we think, they challenge us, we don’t know how to describe them, and we end up, if we’re forced to explain ourselves, in calling them ugly because we can’t think of a better was to describe our feelings. And the real problem with asking people what they think about something is that we don’t have a good way to distinguish between these two states. We don’t have a good way of distinguishing between the thing that really is ugly and the thing that is radical and challenging and simply new and unusual.

And so often when we use the evidence of what people say, to determine what we ought to do, what we ought to go forward [with], we end up throwing out not just the things that ought to be thrown out, but the very things that are most meaningful, and have the potential to be most revolutionary.

There are, I think, two important lessons in that; the first is the one I dwell on in my book, which is simply that because of this fact people who come up with new ideas and new products or radical new things need to be very careful in how they interpret the evidence of consumers, the people that they ask about, random people whose opinions they seek. That we need to be very skeptical of ‘no’ and very skeptical of ‘ugly’ and very skeptical of ‘I don’t like that’. Particularly when we’re dealing with something that is radical and in some way challenging and difficult for someone to completely explain their feelings about. That’s one implication.

But the second implication, which is really one that’s more relevant to this discussion here, is that we’ve gotten really really good in recent years at describing all kinds of things about the way that human beings work and the way the mind operates. We understand genetics, we understand physiology, we have a whole vast array of knowledge now about why we do the things we do. But there is one area, perhaps the most important area of all, where we remain really really bad, and that is interpreting the contents of our own hearts, and as we go forward and learn more and more about human beings, I think we need to remember this fact, and to be humbled, because I’m not sure this is a mystery that we’re gonna solve.