Recently, I was reading the book Blink! by Malcolm Gladwell (author of the bestseller The Tipping Point). Blink! talks about how people make snap judgments: as soon as they encouter something, their subconscious makes judgments/decisions about it. This may be a well-parroted fact, but Blink! goes further in a few respects.
Malcolm Gladwell explains that most of us cannot give very good explanations of how we’re making the snap judgments, and in fact, when we try to explain, our judgments often get confused, and we can significantly mislead ourselves. He quotes a study where two sets of students were given a set of problems about a board game. The first set, before being shown the problems, was asked to think about soccer hooligans, the latter to think about college professors. The second set of students did statistically better than the first.
In another study, students were called to a person’s office, and there was a short exercise. For some students, there were “anger” words occurring more frequently in the exercise, while for others, there were “polite” words occurring more frequently. The students who were primed with the anger words were more prone to interrupt another individual than the students primed with the polite words (the experiment was set up fairly carefully).
Perhaps the biggest eye-opener is Gladwell’s discussion of implicit association. Harvard’s Implicit Association Project has a number of tests you can take to determine whether you have implicit associations, for instance, associations of women with driving, or associations of old people with doing the laundry (these aren’t very typical associations).
Where do these findings come in? Gladwell says that there are some people who can train their instincts in a way that they are not misled by their subconscious, basically because they choose to observe what is relevant, and choose to ignore what is irrelevant. Thus, they not only refuse to be budged by irrelevant features, but also observe the relevant features in the very short span of time given by initial exposure. Secondly, they are able to act on their subconscious observations, and do not mis-attribute the observations to incorrect reasons or get fuddled by too many questions or doubts.
When collecting data about the way users will respond to a product, or collecting data about the effectiveness of a service, people may not give very good answers. Why? Firstly, if the survey contains too many questions, that force the person to rate and answer qualitatively, that may actually change the person’s initial snap judgment. Gladwell describes this in a study of jam preferences. Experts and random people were made to taste a range of jams. The random people, in a snap judgment, did almost the same as the experts, and the market, in giving relative ratings for the jams. However, when given a questionnaire to describe the reasons for their choice, with questions about specific aspects of the jam, the random people messed up and changed their preferences. The experts, who were able to store the tastes and understand exactly what was going on, didn’t get befuddled by the questionnaire.
Something similar happened with the Aeron chair — a highly ergonomic chair. The Aeron chair and its variants are now the de facto in the software industry. But when it was first brought out of the lab, there weren’t many takers. People looking at the chair just didn’t believe it’d be great, because it didn’t match up with the conventional wisdom of how chairs should look. It was only with the passage of time, as people started using the chair and found their backaches steadily reducing, that the chair started becoming popular. Today, the chair isn’t regarded as ugly, but when it was introduced, it was considered to be aesthetically repugnant.
This again raises questions about the way we collect feedback about the products and ideas we are developing. It also means that when reading people’s reviews about something, the ‘’snap factor” and the fact that the reasons they state may not be their real reasons, need to be borne in mind.
One example of this is the speed with which people judge things online. For instance, a number of people who look at the Citizendium and find that it doesn’t have an article on an important topic like Bill Gates decide that the encyclopedia isn’t quite in competition with Wikipedia. In a similar way, people may read one article on Citizendium, and decide that the quality of Citizendium is better (or worse) than Wikipedia.
Is this correct or good judgment? Gladwell’s book shows that snap judgments are often surprisingly good, and asking more from people usually leads to possibly misleading interpretations of one’s own behavior. Nonetheless, snap judgments made out of context can be bad and misleading. For instance, considering the fact that Citizendium has been around for only about 1.5 years, compared to Wikipedia’s 7, and the fact that Wikipedia, at a similar stage in time, was in a substantially worse state, means that a current state comparison of the two encyclopedias isn’t a very reliable way. It would be reliable if the information-gathering mechanism took age differences and policy differences into account; and the experienced web surfer would know what pages on a website to look up to get an idea of what directions it is taking.
Nonetheless, with the democratization of the Internet, blogging isn’t limited to savvy and unbiased web surfers who’re on the lookout for understanding policies and directions and evolution of things. The typical web surfer is still likely to take a look at something and say Yes, that works and No, that’s not good enough. This means that a product that is good, but unusual, may simply not receive the attention of large masses of people who are measuring it against metrics they understand.
Does this mean that new and different ideas are prone to failure? No, and this is where the Wisdom of Crowds (as described in Surowiecki’s book) comes in. Even though people on average may have biases, and even though these biases may on the whole may go agianst a product, if the product has genuinely new value to offer, there will be a few people who’ll be willing to deviate from the crowd and go for the product. Of course, there are also a few people who deviate from the crowd when it’s making the right decisions. But as Surowiecki points out, diversity and independence and the willingness of people to deviate from the crowd are what add to the wisdom of the crowd.
How does a new product gain the masses? When Google started out, they had to struggle for three years before their Backrub algorithm actually won the attention of an investor. Before that, their algorithm was popular, and liked, but nobody was staking themselves on it. But then there was an indvidual who could see the potential rather than the current scope of application, and this individual pumped money into the product. Today, we don’t even think aobut it when doing a Google search, but if it hadn’t been for the individuals who really pumped money into it, Google might well have died, or been delayed in its evolution (which may mean, for instance, that GMail would have come two years later than it did).
While some products like the Aeron Chair meet with instantaneous repulsion, others like Google Search meet with a somewhat lukewarm response. It’s good, but I still like my Yahoo! search that has indexed a much larger part of the web may have been the response of people initially exposed to Google search. However, Google was able to break through to become the de facto search engine. How? Because there were enough people who took a bit if the risk and pain of handling a developing product, because they saw the potential. And as the product became better and more comprehensive, the number of people using it became more and more, and it made more and more sense to use Google.
This is common sense, but very important: when a product is in the initial stages, let the masses see it if you want, but don’t let them be the arbiters of its value. Use their feedback, but do not take it literally. Some people will come up with imaginative suggestions, that need to be valued. But often, the objections of people are to the current appearance rather than to the idea and its potential. The more tuned a person is to the rate at which the product quality can change ,the more that person can separate the aspects that can change and be improved, from the aspects that are intrinsic to the new value offered by the product.
As yet another example, take the evolution of computers as a tool for writing. When computers first came into play, people thought things like: the disc space is expensive, it’s easier and faster to write on paper, one can make multiple copies, one can post letters to people across the world. Today, disk space is cheaper, multiple copies can be made and sent across the world much more easily on the computer, and almost all the advantages that paper and pen had over computers, have now been inverted. To top things, we now have interoperability: both scanning and printing are virtually free, and with improved word recognition technologies, writing something by hand would be equivalent to typing it. So if people using the computer had said: there’s just no way it can match up with all the conveniences of writing, they’d have been missing the malleability of the digital technology.
