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When qual misses the point

When qual misses the point

Our brain is primed to reach false conclusions. Psychologists have a name for the cognitive bias that makes us prone to assigning a causal relationship to two events simply because they happened one after the other: the “illusion of causality.”

Case in point - in a ground-breaking piece of research, Nisbett and Wilson showed women four pantyhose and asked them to choose the best. When asked why they made their decision they gave all manner of reasons strength, elasticity etc. The thing is... all four pairs were identical.

We often use qualitative research to help us understand the causal mechanisms behind consumer behavior. However, much of this research is based on the customer's illusion of causality. Very few, if any of us truly understand our decision-making process so much qual research misses the point.

To avoid inherent biases in qual we need to...

  • Acknowledge that research that asks people to describe their descision-making is fundamentally flawed

  • Rely far more heavily on in-market research such as multivariate tests to guide our customer understanding

  • Investigate alternative qualitative methodologies such as the Jobs To Be Done methodology to uncover behavior motivations and triggers.

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