Overcoming the Illusion of Will and Self-Fabrication: Going Beyond Naïve Subjective Personal Introspection to an Unconscious/Conscious Theory of Behavior Explanation
Arch G. Woodside Boston College
June 2005 June 12, 2005 7:15 PM FINAL
Correspondence regarding this article should be sent to Arch G. Woodside, Boston College, Carroll School of Management, Department of Marketing, 450 Fulton Hall, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467; telephone / fax: +1-617-552-3069 / 6677 (email:
[email protected]).
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Overcoming the Illusion of Will and Self-Fabrication: Going Beyond Naïve Subjective Personal Introspection to an Unconscious/Conscious Theory of Behavior Explanation
ABSTRACT Naïve subjective personal introspection includes the failure to recognize the confirmability of one’s own attitudes and personal meanings learned explicitly from self-examining such topics and explaining one’s own behavior. Unconscious/conscious theory of behavior explanation follows from unifying the research on unintended thought-behavior with folk explanations of behavior. This article describes advances in research confirming own attitudes and personal meaning and suggests the need for applying multiple methods to overcome the fundamental attribution error, inherent cultural prejudices, and the general bias toward self-fabrication. The discussion is valuable for achieving a deep understanding of how customers think, advancing from subjective to confirmatory personal introspection, and understanding the need to apply research tools useful for enlightening knowledge and overcoming the inherent bias within subjective personal introspection.
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Overcoming the Illusion of Will and Self-Fabrication: Going Beyond Naïve Subjective Personal Introspection to an Unconscious/Conscious Theory of Behavior Explanation In reviewing relevant literature Woodside (2004b) provides a series of telling propositions regarding subjective and confirmatory personal introspection. The following points reflect and extend these propositions. (1) The dominant logic in consumer research includes asking questions that require some amount of subjective personal introspection by a respondent—whether or not a separate individual is asking the question or the informant both asks herself and answers the question and whether or not the informant answers the question face-to-face with a researcher, reads the question in a survey, or ponders the issue alone. (2) Because most thinking occurs unconsciously (Bargh 2002; Wegner, 2002; Zaltman 2003) and the informant has limited access to her own unconscious thinking, the informant is able to retrieve, interpret, and report (to herself and others) only a limited amount of relevant knowledge and insight when answering questions and pondering a specific topic. (3) The use of additional research tools (beyond self-interviewing and meditation) aids in surfacing and confirming/refuting both events and personal meanings that the informant otherwise concludes to be accurate answers reflecting her own prior, and/or currently held, beliefs and attitudes. The comment on Woodside (2004b) by Gould (2005) is useful for stimulating an elaboration here on these three points—an elaboration leading to a call for crafting a unified theory of how the mind explains behavior unconscious and consciously. Following this introduction, section one of the present article describes the crux of Gould’s comment
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and demonstrates its fallacy. Section two elaborates on advanced attribution errors, that is, (1) personal denial of committing the fundamental attribution error, the illusion of will, including unawareness that implicit (automatic, unconscious) meaning is relevant for subjective personal introspection (SPI) and (2) disregard and denial of the usefulness of member checks (independent assessments of an SPI for accuracy and completeness) and other tools (e.g., implicit association tests (see Brunel, Tietje & Greenwald, 2004; Maison, Greenwald, & Bruin 2004), the forced metaphor elicitation technique for uncovering unconscious meaning, see Woodside, 2004b)—tools permitting access to unconscious personal meaning that otherwise remain inaccessible to the researcher-informant. Section three explicates the folk-conceptual theory of behavior explanation (see Hilton 1990; McClure 2002; Malle, 1999; Malle, 2004a, 2004b; Malle & Knobe 1997) and emphasizes this theory’s relevancy to SPI research and theory. Section four emphasizes the critical importance of SPI and the use of mixed research designs in SPI research for (1) theory building in consumer research, (2) deepening individual and group sense making, and (3) aiding in preventing unfair, bad, and downright dangerous decision-making (e.g., Gaither, 2002; Kozak, 1996)—reasons that substantially extend Gould’s (1995) defense of SPI in responding to Wallendorf and Brucks (1993) criticism of the method. The article closes with conclusions and implications for theory and research. DEEPENING SUBJECTIVE PERSONAL INTROSPECTION Gould (2005)’s comment is incorrect in several aspects but the more important flaw is its ignoring the main point in Woodside (2004b): Because subjective personal introspection pervades consumer research and both the researcher and informant (whether or not both are the same individual or different persons) are unable to examine relevant
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unconscious and conscious data using only one method (e.g., Buddhist meditation), applying mixed methods designs (Tashakkori & Teddlie, 1998) is essential for correcting event memory failures and overcoming fundamental and advanced attribution errors. Here is the essence of Gould’s (2005) comment: Thus, when people tell stories about their lives, confirmation could mean that the researcher would seek a member check on the accuracy of accounting for certain events. For example, did the individual engage in a certain behavior or not? But there is no member checking the meaning a person assigns in the story. This is her own introspective story. People can compare stories with one another but one does not generally ‘confirm’ one’s own story in terms of personal meaning. When Holbrook [(2005)] is asking his mother about certain remembrances, he is engaging in retrospection in some sort of confirmation through his mother. But again, he is not confirming the personal meanings of his experiences or of his story. Thus, Woodside makes what is a major flaw [that] underlies much of his argument in establishing the need for confirmation; he conflates event-memory checking where confirmation may be useful with meaning and experiential member checking where it is not. A seemingly minor point: Because Holbrook (2005, p. 48) does not see the need, his report does not include asking his mother anything, without him asking she volunteers. “I often find myself musing over what rampant lack of self-confidence would encourage a mechanical reliance on such self-imprisoning safeguards and such vision-restricting
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formulas [e.g., member checks]. (The closest I have come to a member check has been inviting my 91-year-old mother to attend a conference where I presented some of this material and dutifully making revisions in my comments as she called out occasional corrections from the audience.)” Holbrook’s view is an example of an advanced overconfidence bias applied to interpreting both factual accuracy and meaningfulness in his SPI. His SPI research would benefit from replacing his musing about “rampant lack of self-confidence” with a more mindful, complex model of explicit-implicit thinking (cf., Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001). His use of a triangulation of data collection methods (i.e., his SPI, examining 2,300 photographs taken by his grandfather, and his mother’s member check) counters his disparaging remarks about using additional data collection methods beyond SPI. Overconfidence and self-fabrication rather than a rampant lack of self-confidence are the dominant human tendencies in explaining our own behavior to ourselves and others (cf., Langer, 1975; Wegner, 2002; Wilson 2002). Overconfidence bias in cognitive science (e.g., Girgerenzer, 2000; Gilovich, 1991; Gilovich, Griffin, & Kahneman, 2002; Lichtenstein, Fischhoff, & Phillips, 1982) refers to the human tendency to overestimate the accuracy of one’s own answers. For instance, the study by Lichtenstein et al. (1982) gave participants questions such as “Absinthe is (a) a precious stone or (b) a liqueur”; they chose what they believed was the correct answer and then were asked for a confidence rating in their answers, for example, 90% certain. When people said they were 100% certain about individual answers, they had in the long run only about 80% correct answers; when they were 90% certain, then had in the long run only 75% correct answers, and so on. Lichtenstein et al. (1982) identify such discrepancy as the overconfidence bias and
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explain its occurrence by general heuristics in memory search, such as confirmation biases, or general motivational tendencies, such as the illusion of validity (see Girgerenzer, 2000). Advanced overconfidence bias (AOB) goes beyond such cognitive science reports of overconfidence bias. AOB includes the implicit—and often inaccurate—assumption that the person holds unconsciously the meaning she reports in a SPI. The main point here relates to McClelland, Koestner, and Weinberger’s (1992) evidence and conclusion favoring dual (explicit and implicit) motives and goals—not that SPI reports are invalid but that SPI and alternative introspection data collection methods tap different levels of meaning and explanations. Not recognizing this possibility and not using mixed method designs to acquire both explicit and implicit personal introspection data is committing AOB. Implicit motives are needs that people acquire in childhood that have become automatic and nonconscious. Self-attributed motives are people’s conscious theories about their needs that may often differ from their nonconscious needs. The picture McClelland and his colleagues paints is of two independent explanatory systems that operate in parallel and influence different types of behaviors. “In our terms, the adaptive unconscious and the conscious explanatory system each has its own set of needs and motives that influence different types of behaviors” (Wilson, 2002). The SPI reports in the consumer research literature (e.g., Gould, 1991; Holbrook 2005) are akin to explicitly interviewing yourself without recognizing the usefulness of applying implicit interviewing methods to capture unconscious meanings and motives. FUNDAMENTAL AND ADVANCED ATTRIBUTION ERRORS
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The fundamental attribution error (Ross & Nisbett, 1991; Wilson, 2002) refers to people overlooking situational influences on their actions and inferring that they acted on the basis of their own internal states—inferring internal states via explicit interpretation without the use of tools for learning implicit thinking. Choi, Nisbett and Norenzayan (1999) demonstrate the people in Western cultures are especially prone to the fundamental attribution error, and that people in East Asian cultures are less prone. The advanced attribution error (AAE) includes denial that the fundamental attribution error is relevant personally and that applying additional tools (a mixed methods research strategy) will help overcome illusion of will and cultural bias that occur automatically during SPI. Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996) demonstrate how situation-message treatments (i.e., marketing manipulations) can influence behavior directly without affecting participants’ introspection. These researchers had college participants fill out a scrambledsentence that included words such as “wrinkled, gray, retired, wise,” and “old.” These participants were thus primed with the stereotype of an old person, whereas other participants in the study did not receive this version of the test. As each participant left the experiment room, the person’s gait was measured surreptitiously. The individuals who had been led to think about senior citizens walked more slowly than did those not primed with this thought. The idea of the action arose from the stereotype and so influenced the behavior directly, apparently without conscious will. Extensive postexperimental interviews suggested that the participants were not particularly conscious of the aged stereotype after the experiment. And even if they were, they were certainly unaware that this might suggest they should walk at a different speed, or for that matter that their
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walking speed was being assessed. Yet merely thinking of the kind of person who walks slowly seemed to be sufficient to induce shuffling (Wegner, 2002, p. 128). Gladwell (2005) offers several examples of how conscious and unconscious thinking and deciding in the same person often diverge and conflict. The winning trombone-playing performance of Abbie Conant, a professional concert musician, in a behind-a-screen competitive audition is a case in point. Ms. Conant played sixteenth in the thirty-three candidate audition. Her playing was so outstanding that the Philharmonic music director, Sergiu Celibidache, cried out, “That’s who we want!” The competition was stopped and the remaining seventeen players sent home. There were two more rounds of auditions. Conant passed both with flying colors. But once Celibidache and the rest of the committee saw her in the flesh, all those long-held prejudices began to compete with the winning first impression they had of her performance. She joined the orchestra, and Celibidache stewed. A year passed. In May of 1981, Conant was called to a meeting. She was demoted to second trombone, she was told. No reason was given. Conant went on probation for a year, to prove herself again. It made no difference. “You know the problem,” Celibidache told her. “We need a man for the solo trombone.” (Gladwell, 2005, p. 247). Conant took the case to court and over the next 13 years she won several rounds of battles (in courtrooms and additional auditions) including reinstatement as first trombone and pay equal to male colleagues (Gladwell, 2005).
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Might reports of culture-trained automatic thinking differ in ways unrecognized in existing SPI reports (e.g., Gould, 1991; Holbrook, 1986, 1995, 2003, 2005)? Would the use of additional tools in a mixed methods design (e.g., screened and unscreened auditions) sometimes confirm and sometimes disconfirm meanings expressed in explicit thinking reports? In two studies Brunel, Tiethe, and Greenwald (2004) provide evidence of such confirmation and disconfirmation within consumer research contexts. Their studies compare participants’ explicit attitude reports with implicit association test (IAT) findings. Based on computer-mediated response latency measurement protocols, the IAT measure is computed by comparing the relative response times associated with several categorization tasks (see Brunel et al. for details). Study 1 reports high efficacy of the IAT as a measure of brand attitudes and brand relationship strength toward Macintosh and Microsoft Windows-based PC machines: under conditions in which participants were not expected to hide their beliefs, explicit brand attitudes were strongly correlated to implicit attitudes and implicit brand relationship, thereby validating the IAT for brand evaluation. Study 2 demonstrates no significant differences between explicit attitudes toward ads with White spokespersons compared to ads with Black spokespersons suggesting that at the explicit level, participants do not exhibit racial preferences; however, implicit measures of attitude toward ads reveal strong preference for ads containing White versus Black spokespersons. Brunel et al. (2004) conclude, “Consumers’ associative brand networks may include concepts and associations that a consumer either cannot or will not report [to others or themselves], but which may surface through the IAT.” A number of additional studies examine the effect of introspection, or thinking about reasons, on attitudes, judgments, and choices (e.g., Levine, Halberstadt, &
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Goldstone, 1996; Simonson & Nowlis, 2000; Wilson, Hodges, & LaFleur, 1995). When people are asked to explain their attitudes (or choices), they tent to focus on a subset of the reasons that would otherwise (without the need to explain) influence their attitudes, particularly reasons that are verbalizable, accessible, plausible, and/or self-enhancing. Having to provide reasons or introspect can affect choices, because provided reasons are typically only a subset of the factors that would otherwise influence preferences. FOLK-CONCEPTUAL THEORY OF MIND AND BEHAVIOR EXPLANATION Heretofore, the consumer research literature does not include the unique and valuable advances in the literature of how people explain their own behavior (i.e., SPI). Malle (1999, 2004) summarizes this body of work and develops the “folk-conceptual theory” of mind and behavior explanation (folk model, for short). “It is not, however, ordinary people’s own theory of explanation (they probably don’t have one), but rather a genuine scientific theory” (Malle, 2004, p. 236). Malle points out that prior attribution theory focuses introspection on people allegedly classifying causes of effect outcomes into two major categories: person and situation causes—greatly simplifying the possible conceptual framework in which explanations are embedded. Similarly, Gould’s (1991) typology of energy states focuses on a small subset of human explanation—“bodily felt experience of everyday consumption” (p. 205) rather than representing a sophisticated folk model of mind and behavior. The folk model categorizes behavior explanations into two major modes of explanation—reason and cause—as well as two minor modes—causal history reasons (CHR) and enabling factors (EF). Reason explanations are people’s explanations of an intentional behavior that cite the agent’s reasons for acting that way; cause explanations
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are people’s explanations of an unintentional behavior that cite the causes that brought about the behavior. Causal history of reason explanations provide an explanatory link between reasons and their own causal history, citing factors that preceded and thus brought about the reasons for an action. These explanations literally describe the causal history of reasons, which could lie in childhood, in cultural training, in personality traits, or in a situational cue that triggered a particular desire (Malle, 1999). Without direct reference to the folk model literature, Allen (2002) demonstrates the dominance of causal history of reason and enabling factor explanations in his “fits-like-a-glove (FLAG) framework choice of postsecondary education. Similarly, Holbrook’s (2005) SPI application of an eight-cell value typology, extrinsic-intrinsic, self-other oriented, and active-reactive provides a causal history of reason explanation—rich in value interpretation but very narrow in coverage of behavior explanation. Enabling factors explanations refer to the agent’s skill, efforts, opportunities, or to removed obstacles (see McClure & Hilton, 1997; Turnbull, 1986); these explanations take it for granted that the agent had an intention (and reasons) to perform the behavior; what they try to clarify is how it was possible that this behavior was in fact performed” (Malle 1999, p. 31). Enabling factor explanations only explain the action’s occurrence—they cannot be sued to explain why the agent formed the intention in the first place (which is what reason explanations do). For example, “How come John aced the exam?”—He’s a stats whiz.” Such enabling factor explanations refer to the agent’s skills, efforts, opportunities, or to removed obstacles Malle, 1999, p. 31; also, McClure & Hilton, 1997;
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Turbull, 1986). Gould’s (1991) eight cell typology of energy states: tense-calm, energized-tired, absorbed-not absorbed is an enabling-factor explanations framework. Malle (2004) contends that two broad motivations for explaining behavior exist: finding meaning (i.e., sense making (cf. Weick 1995)) and managing social interaction. These two broad motivations correspond to the two forms in which explanations exist in the world: as cognitive representatives and as communicative acts. Strong self-serving biases tend to occur in behavior explanations that favors selffabrication over self-revelation (Wilson, 2002). On one level of analysis (type of behavior explained), explanations of actions are most likely to enhance or diminish one’s self-image because they are observable, and hence accessible for evaluation by others, and intentional (thus fully subject to either praise or blame). Conversely, experiences are unobservable (thus difficult to evaluate by others) and unintentional (hence easier to excuse from responsibility), so explanations of experiences should be at least susceptible to self-serving biases. On another level of analysis (mode of explanation), self-serving actors should explain their positive behaviors with reasons (implying intentionality) and their negative behaviors with causes (implying lack of intentionality) because intentionality intensifies praise and blame. On a third level of analysis, citing situation causes for negative behaviors reduces blame and citing person causes increases blame, both when using cause explanations and when using enabling factor explanations (see Malle, 1999; Malle & Bennett, 1988; Weiner, 1995). Examining the preconditions (e.g., meta thinking by the actor of her perceived intentionality of a behavior—“did I really intend to do that?) affects which behavior explanation category most likely applies to explain behavior. If the self-informant
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perceives that the behavior was unintentional, situation/person cause explanations most often occur. If perception is that the behavior was intentional, belief/desire reason explanations most frequently occur and CHR and EF explanations also occur but with less frequency. Alternative framing of the behavior explanation issue affects the category applied in SPIs. “How was this possible?” is a frame that increases EF explanations that otherwise are rare when the framing is a motivationally biased question—“Why?” or “What for?” Malle et al. (1998) supports this hypothesis, finding that enabling factor explanations occur 4 to 12 times more frequently in response to a “How possible?” question than in response to any other explanatory question. Moreover, enabling factor explanations should be frequent when the behavior is difficult to perform but rare when the behavior is easy to accomplish (McClure & Hilton, 1997; Malle, 1999). Exhibit 1 illustrates how different ways of framing issues influence behavior explanations. For example, several researchers (Becker, 1998; Thompson, Locander, & Pollio 1989; Woodside 2004a) caution against using “Why?” framing questions for several reasons, for example, the question implies intention when the behavior occurred unintentionally; informants, even self-informants, become defensive because “Why?” requires an answer that makes sense, one that does not reveal logical flaws and inconsistencies; “How?” questions give people more leeway, are less constraining, and encourage telling a story that includes a chain of events, thinking, and evaluating. However, Becker (1987, p. 60) emphasizes an important exception to his condemnation of “why” questions: sometimes the self-informant or other researcher want to know, exactly, what kinds of reasons the informant gives for what she has done or think she might do as
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part of a description that guides thinking. But, in his study investigating choice of postsecondary education, Allen (2002) provides examples of informants finding great difficulty in answering “why” questions but their difficulty vanishes quickly when providing in situ descriptions regarding “who, what, where, when” issues. __________ Exhibit 1 here. __________ Malle (2004, p. 122) emphasizes that the influence of explanatory choices can be found at every level of analysis, “People increase their use of causal history explanations when accounting for negative actions (Nelson & Malle,2003); they increase their use of belief reasons when trying to appear rational (Malle et al., 2000), and they explicitly add a mental marker to their belief reasons when they want to distance themselves from the agent [or situation] (e.g., ‘Why is he looking at apartments?’—‘He thinks I am moving in with him’; Malle et al., 2000).” The use of mental state markers on reasons occurs in introspection reports, for example, when a person distances current belief or want from reports of belief and want in the prior situation that the researcher-informant is describing (e.g., “I searched on-line because I thought I could get a better deal”) versus not marking the reason (e.g., “I searched on-line to get a better deal”). Note Exhibit 1 includes a feedback relationship between belief and desire reasons to describe the finding that valuing occurs automatically from a belief and that humans are culturally trained to perceive and categorize information, and form beliefs, based on evaluations—judgments of familiar and acceptable behaviors, desires, and dislikes. Valuing is finding benefit from achieving the goal implied by a belief.
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What should be done to overcome framing biases? A useful initial answer: because explicating descriptive details may help reduce the influence of the fundamental attribution error and aids in uncovering the if-then contingencies in behavior explanations (see Woodside & Wilson, 2003), self-informant behavior explaining benefits from first asking “what, how, where, and when” questions before asking “who and why” questions. A useful follow-up answer: let us recognize the need to apply multiple framing questions for the same behavior explanation issue because all questions include biases (e.g., see Clark & Schober, 1992). A third answer: because behavior explanation includes both unconscious and conscious intentional and unintentional thinking that the self-informant is unable to uncover adequately from any one inquiry method, SPI benefits from employing mixed method designs for confirming events and personal meanings and identifying the applicability of explicit versus implicit meanings and attitudes for specific behaviors. MIXED METHODOLOGY IN SUBJECTIVE PERSONAL INTROSPECTION Gladwell (2005, pp. 81-84) dramatically illustrates the use of a mixed method design for (dis)confirming meanings expressed in his explicit SPI. He reports, “I’ve taken the Race IAT [available at www.implicit.harvard.edu] on many occasions, and the result always leaves me feeling a bit creepy. At the beginning of the test, you are asked what your attitudes towards blacks and whites are. I answered, as I am sure most of you would, that I think of the races as equal. Then comes the [implicit association] test. You’re encouraged to complete it quickly… I took the test a second time, and then a third time, and then a fourth time, hoping that the awful feeling of bias would go away. It made no difference. It turns out that more than 80 percent of all those who have ever taken the test end up having pro-white associations, meaning that it takes them measurably longer to
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complete answers when they are required to put good words into the “Black category than when they are required to link bad things with black people. I didn’t do quite so badly. On the Race IAT, I was rated as having a ‘moderate automatic preference for whites.’ But then again, I’m half black. (My mother is Jamaican.)” As Bargh, et al. (1996), McClelland et al. (1992), and Wilson (2002) stress and empirically support, the most important point being made here is that attitude, motive, and meaning self-report measures do not correspond to implicit (e.g., IAT, TAT, and FMET—forced metaphor elicitation technique, Woodside 2004b) measures. Gould (2005) mistakes Woodside (2004b) as seeing “one of the problems with introspection as being its subjectivity and the need to reign that in with various confirmatory approaches”. Woodside (2004b) focuses on broadening SPI—not trying to reign it in—by making the case for combining explicit and implicit methods in SPI reports. Applying the useful proposition that research to learn explicit or implicit meanings held by an informant applies to SPI, Exhibit 2 is a typology of research methods that provides insights for designing mixed method designs and for building SPI theory that covers both explicit and implicit meaning. The typology includes the eight possible combinations of verbal vs. nonverbal, explicit vs. implicit, and positivistic vs. interpretative methods; examples of each of the eight, and combinations of using two of each, are available in the consumer research literature. ___________ Exhibit 2 here. ___________
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Cell 1, the fixed-point survey method, is the dominant research method for most studies attempting to measure informant-held meaning. Major advantages of this method include ease of data collection of explicit meanings held individually for a large number of informants and the applicability of statistical hypothesis testing. Limitations of this method include the failure to recognize that most informant-thinking is done unconsciously and that implicit thinking may differ substantially from explicit thinking, along with social-desirability biases in answering questions explicitly (see Fisher 1993). Cell 2, existential-phenomenological reports (see Thompson, et al., 1989) includes the researcher starting with a very broad question and allowing the informant to reframe and pose additional questions as well as answers. Such interviews provide “thick descriptions” of situations, thinking processes, and some amount of both explicit and implicit meanings held by the informant. Self-editing of responses before the informant shares them with the researcher likely limits the value of the method along with the inability of the informant to retrieve a substantial share of implicit meaning held in memory. However, especially when the practice includes multiple interviews over several weeks with the same informant, the method offers the advantage of self-revelation of implicit meanings the informant rarely becomes aware when completing fixed-point surveys (e.g., see Cox 1967). Cell 3, automatic thought-retrieval research, includes asking what benefits and beliefs evoke which brands (e.g., see Thelen & Woodside, 1997). The method is useful for measuring implicit meanings associated as well as not associated with a given brand versus competing brands. The method has the advantages of limiting the occurrence of self-desirability bias, the collection of implicit data for a large number of informants, and
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applicability of statistical hypothesis testing. Limitations being unable to uncover the causal history reasons that support the automatic brand retrievals. Cell 4 include TAT (see McClelland, et al., 1992), and the FMET (see Woodside, 2004b. McClelland provides compelling evidence supporting the external validity of TAT data and offers mixed method reports comparing explicit and implicit informant-held meanings. Cell 4 methods often require extensive training of researchers and often substantial effort in analyzing data. Cell 5, direct observation-based frequency recordings include researcher assumptions about the implicit meanings held by consumers. For example, Wells and Losciuto (1966) infer some consumers examined packages to learn price information while others did not by direct observation. The method has all the advantages associating from “being there” and not relying on informant’s memory. Playing back video or tape recordings of consumers in naturally-occurring situations to learn their explicit interpretations of their own behavior represent a mixed method design (e.g., see Taylor & Woodside). Like all interpretive methods cell 5 requires very substantial effort for both data collection and analysis. Cell 6, direct observation meaning reports, includes the informant creating a tangible expression of meanings and interpretations that she wishes or is able to share with the researcher. The collages from magazine and newspaper images that Zaltman’s informants create as part of the ZMET are examples of nonverbal data. Doyle and Sims’ (2002) advances in the “cognitive sculpting” technique provide another example. Data collection usually extends to include both etic (researcher) and emic (informant) explicit
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interpretations of the nonverbal expressions; thus, a mixed method design results actual applications of cell 6 methods. Cell 7 includes IAT reports (e.g., Brunel, et al., 2004; Masion et al., 2004). Brunel and his colleagues (2004) demonstrate the value of collecting both explicit and implicit meanings held by informants—applying the mixed method strategy of combining cells 1 and 7. Gladwell’s (2005) commentary of his own prior explicit-survey and IAT-implicit associations represents a three-method design: cells 1, 2, and 7. Cell 8, behavioral drama enactments, includes video-tapping and interpreting informants’ enactments of themselves as inanimate objects, for example, “using facial and body gestures and motions with any available props that you might care to use, describe yourself as a typewriter (or dog, cat, sports utility vehicle, ice cream), for examples, see Dichter (1964). To expand on etic interpretations of informant enactments, asking informants to observe video-tapes and interpret their own performances offers the opportunity of expanding from a single to a mixed-method design, for example, combining cell 8 with cell 2. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THEORY AND RESEARCH SPI is pervasive in consumer research—answering questions asked by ourselves or others requires SPI. SPI researchers (e.g., Gould and Holbrook) need encouragement to look beyond single-method applications to mixed-method designs as Woodside (2004b) illustrates in SPI reporting. This point is extremely important for building and testing scientific theory, building in safeguards to protect ourselves from our own biases and selffabrications when making decisions affecting ourselves and others, as well as increasing
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mindfulness (Gaither, 2002; Kozak, 2006; Weed, 1991; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001) while reducing arrogance. Along with ignoring the multiple methods Woodside (2004b) describes and applies, the main point Gould (2005) suggests is inaccurate: “But there is no member checking the meaning a person assigns in the story. This is her own introspective story.” Own explicit self-reports often do not express the same implicit meaning held by the same informant—our own implicit introspection stories often differ dramatically from own explicit storytelling. Single-method SPI reporting and criticism of calls for using multiple-method, explicit-implicit tools in SPI studies illustrate more than the fundamental attribution error and overconfidence bias. Such criticism is illustrative of not doing the homework confirming that humans are incapable of explicitly fully uncovering their own-held meaning without resorting to mixed-method explicit-implicit research designs. Fortunately, the work of Bargh, et al. (1996), Brunel, et al. (2004), McClelland et al. (1992), Wegner (2002), Wilson (2002), Woodside (2004b), and Zaltman (2003) advance SPI research methodology beyond single-method explications of meaning. The work of Allen (2002), Hilton (1990), Malle (1999, 2004), McClure and Hilton (1997), Wegner (2002), and Wilson (2002) advances behavior explanation research well beyond person-situation attribution theory (Kelley, 1967, 1973) and person-trait only typologies (e.g., Gould, 1991; Holbrook, 2005). Thus, the future is bright and the possibilities are profound for advancing SPI in consumer research
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trait CHR (e.g., informant commits act because she is friendly)
offer person CHR
offer situation
implies causal intentionality
Who?
actor’s desired outcome, often called goal, aim, end, or purpose (e.g., “to want to ” “to feel like ”
marker ?
offer desire reason
trait EF
person EF
situation EF
implies enabling intentionality
implies belief/ desired
valuin g
How?
Fram e
Why?
conscious / unconscious knowledge, what actor finds true/ false (e.g., “he thought,” “she knew”)
marker ?
offer belief reason
Key: CHR, causal history reason • valuing--positive or negative affect toward the action or its outcome • marker--mental state verb used to distance oneself from a prior held belief or desire (e.g., “I feared,” “I thought,” “I wanted”)
trait cause (e.g., low/high selfesteem)
person cause: conscious /
situation cause: conscious /
offer cause: actor mentions factors causing the
implies unintentionalit y
What? When?
Exhibit 1. Framing Questions Influence on Directing Subjective Personal Introspection in Explaining Behavior Source: Inspired, in part, by Figure 5.1, Malle (2004, p. 119).
Nonverbal Responses
Verbal Responses
6. Direct observation meaning reports; ZMET 8. Behavioral drama enactments
5. Direct observation frequency recordings 7. Implicit association test
Explicit
Implicit
4. TAT; FMET
3. Automatic thought retrievals
Implicit
Explicit
2. Existentialphenomenological reports
1. Fixed-point survey responses
Interpretive
Positivistic
Exhibit 2. Measuring Informant-Held Explicit and Implicit Associations
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