Speaker 1: Thank you very much and thanks really to everybody at the UMR for hosting this. It's really very interesting so far. So I'm Marie-Claude Gervais, I'm Director of Strategy and Research at VERSITY and we specialize in diversity and inclusion research really to drive innovation. Our experience spans about 25 years of research on the culture and experiences of diverse groups, but also 10 years of experience in digital research. So today I want to talk about cultural irrationality and firstly I want to talk about the theories that we have about human irrationality and make the case that the focus has been a little bit too much on cognitive irrationality as opposed to cultural irrationality. And then I want to discuss how if cultural irrationality were acknowledged by the research industry, our ways of doing research would be quite different and we would get deeper insights. And finally I want to illustrate that through a case study. So I've been thinking about these issues for a long time really, aha, no I don't see my presentation on my computer, hold on a second, aha, here it is, okay. I've been thinking as I said about these issues for a long time, first as a lecturer in social psychology and research methodology at the London School of Economics and then as a commercial researcher specializing in diversity and inclusion. So one of the great contributions of what I would call the irrational turn has been to bring to everyone's attention the fact that human beings are not in any simple way rational. Most of you will be familiar with system one theory with blink behavioural economics, heuristics, herd behaviour, nudges, social desirability biases, conformity biases and all sorts. And all of these theories and concepts aim to define and to understand how irrational we are as a species. So it's now taken for granted that people are not just cognitive beings who carefully weigh up evidence and make considered decisions based on some dispassionate assessments. As a result, the research industry has developed a range of methods to probe and to measure irrationality and unconscious biases at an individual level. These methods will include, for example, implicit association tests or projective techniques, facial coding, biometrics, all sorts. What is still lacking, though, is a kind of similar appreciation of the role of culture, I think, in shaping our perceptions and behaviours. And by culture here, I mean the norms, the values, beliefs, ideologies, the language into which we are socialized and which shape our thinking. Why does this matter? Because unless we understand people as cultural beings, we cannot really claim to understand them at all. It's not enough to describe people's opinions, attitudes and behaviours. We need to understand what lies behind these opinions, these attitudes, these behaviours, where they come from and which functions they serve. These are the really powerful insights that branding and advertising experts, PR and communication strategists, people who develop new products will all crave to really connect with cultural trends and needs. To understand how culture is fundamental to our thinking, as an essential to our thinking, let's consider this. Here's a statement. If Harry loves Meghan, then, sorry for the cultural bias in the selection of the image here, but if Harry loves Meghan, then, if he's honest, he will marry her. This is the kind of sentence that's the stuff of everyday conversations. It sounds logical, but there's nothing objectively true about any of it. It's only convincing from the moment that the people involved in the conversation accept the validity of the cultural ideas of love, honesty, marriage, that are implied in the statement. For other cultures, like the Manu in New Guinea, for example, where they have no word at all for love, that wouldn't work. Across Asia, many people marry to promote the interests of their respective families rather than because of some deep love between two individuals. Arguably, and despite the very elaborate discourse about romantic love in the West, marriage might be construed as a way of creating a unit of production and consumption that essentially works to sustain capitalism. Now, the point of this example is to show that irrationality is culturally patterned, and necessarily so. In fact, as human beings, we cannot think or communicate outside of culture, outside of the language we use to think our thoughts, of the symbols that we share with others. And even when we disagree with one another and try to challenge the status quo, we still know what it is that we disagree about and how to go about disagreeing. Basic cognitive processes, like perception, memory, categorization, are not culture-free. What we perceive, how we categorize information, what we remember and what we forget, always and necessarily involved and reflect cultural interpretation. So culture is inherently, or is inherent, as it were, in human cognition. It's not just a set of external forces that distort or influence our thinking after the event. The problem is that the research industry, as I see it, has not yet really developed the mindset, let alone the tools, to research and to really make sense of culture. Certainly not at the speed and scale at which it would be required. Just like until very recently, we haven't really understood the importance of individual or cognitive irrationality, or found ways of measuring it. What are the implications for the research industry? What would change in our ways of working and in the methods that we use if we were to bring cultural irrationality to the foreground instead of leaving it in the unexplored background? Firstly, the research industry might recruit differently. We would hire more diverse talent to increase our ability to challenge what we take for granted. We would also hire social scientists who are trained specifically to analyze how culture and institutions work. This would make researchers a great deal more reflexive. We would focus less on attitudes and more on social representations, that is, the shared ways of thinking that underpin what might be very different individual attitudes. By focusing on this deeper level of analysis, we would reveal more potent insights that have wider applicability. The industry as a whole would focus less on self-reports, because the focus on cultural irrationality makes it obvious that we can't really take at face value what people say. Sociologists actually call that the principle of non-consciousness, so the idea that people are not entirely conscious of their own motivations, and that researchers should therefore not rely only on self-reports to access human truth. So while it's a good thing to present the voice of the consumer or customer back to our clients, we would not rely on this in an uncritical fashion and consider a video insight to be the be-all and end-all. We would take a sheet of the anthropologist's book and use participant observation more regularly. Participant observation, for me, is certainly the most complete form of evidence, because one, it relates thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors to the context or the situation where they occur, and two, it maintains both the subjective perspective of the people who are being observed and the objectivity of the researcher. If we took cultural irrationality more seriously, we would make constant use of mobile ethnography and online research communities, because they enable us to enter into people's worlds, to spend time with them where they live, to accompany them through their everyday activities, and to really understand their experiences through their eyes. This grounded view of human behavior is infinitely richer than surveys or focus group data, which are by nature not contextual. We would also look at the material world more closely, the products that people buy, the social media they consume and they produce, the institutions that shape our lives, the images that we take or make or share, all of that. New approaches and tools enable us now to observe and to analyze in an unobtrusive fashion social media content, which is great, so it's a very nice way of gaining consumer insight. But the industry is still lacking tools to do semiotics, for instance, at the speed of business. Our worlds may be saturated with images, from personal photos, to memes, to advertising, but we've yet to develop the technology to make sense of images, despite their huge cultural, commercial, and personal significance. Semiotics remains a specialist, time-consuming, and expensive task, so more work needs to be done to develop tools in that field. And augmented reality is another area that will need to develop. We would also conduct more comparative analyses, a bit like Neil was discussing just now, because looking at different segments or audiences makes it much easier to identify the specific cultural irrationalities that are shared by members of a group, and also to point out to the differences between them and others. And in the same vein, we would also triangulate, as a matter of course, to observe and interpret reality from a range of perspectives. Triangulation might involve using different research methods, of course, but also comparing customer segments or combining different researchers in the process to make sure that the biases inherent in each approach are revealed and taken into account. And finally, we would also value, I would contend, the researcher's expertise and experience a great deal more. The role of the researcher is not just to report what is said by research participants, which frankly, anybody can do. I think it's to reveal the underlying drivers behind people's self-reported experiences, their stated attitudes, their perceived needs, the account they give of their behavior, and to work out the implications of these for brands, for innovation, and communication, for example. Let me illustrate some of this with a case study. This is work that was commissioned by NICE, so the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. The aim was to understand why many Chinese people living in England do not complete their course of antibiotics, so that by understanding that, it was hoped that more we could encourage more Chinese patients to follow their GP's advice and complete their course. So I set out to study Chinese people's, not just attitudes to antibiotics, but their social representations of health in a bigger way. The methods included participant observation, interviews, focus groups, text analysis, all sorts really, to explore the individual social and cultural dimensions of the issue. Among many other interesting things, the research found that Chinese people regularly used both traditional Chinese practices and Western medicine to manage their health and illness. I was struck, because I'm a social psychologist, I guess, by the lack of any obvious conflict in the minds of the Chinese people in the study about combining very different medical practices. It was puzzling to me because one would expect people to experience what I'd call cognitive dissonance or some tension when people try to reconcile very different thoughts or behaviours. But none of that was apparent. And the reason was, the reasons really, were many. And that's because Chinese people fundamentally understood health and illness to depend on maintaining, in their words, some balance and harmony, or what I would call complementarity between traditional Chinese and Western medicines. So what we found is that in making decisions about which system of health they would turn to, Chinese people combined considerations around four different sets of criteria, one to do with the nature of the illness itself. So if it's mild or acute pain, minor or serious condition, for example, the nature of the therapeutic intervention. So if they want something gentle or natural, that they would turn to Chinese medicine. If they want something that's chemical, that's fast, that deals with the symptoms only versus the root cause, which is what traditional Chinese medicine would be used for. So they would combine that. There were tons of psychosocial factors linked, not at all to knowledge, but to the need to defend a Chinese identity in a Western context, or to embrace a more cosmopolitan identity. And the selection of medical systems was very much based on this. And also structural factors to do with availability, with language barriers, with the cost, with the speed at which they could be seen. The point of this is that to understand why people did not complete their course of antibiotics, you needed something much bigger. And somewhere in there was the idea that you would take antibiotics, therefore a Western medicine to deal with symptoms. But as soon as the symptoms went away, you would revert back to a Chinese medical approach to address the root cause of the problem. So making so in order to deal with the behavior change that health professionals wanted to see, you needed to have a much bigger understanding of what was happening. It's not a question simply of the traditional way of researching. That would be to adopt a KAB model, so knowledge, attitude, behavior, with the assumption that if you increase people's knowledge about antibiotics, that will change their attitudes about antibiotics, which in turn will change their behaviors about antibiotics. The study challenged that in a very fundamental way. I would like to conclude, I guess, by just saying that this summer, the British Medical Journal concluded in a study that was published there that, quote, the idea that stopping antibiotic treatment early encourages antibiotic resistance is not supported by evidence, while taking antibiotics for longer than necessary increases the risk of resistance. So it looks as though despite 60 years of medical advice that says you have to complete your course of antibiotics, the Chinese may have been right all along. In other words, British scientific culture has its own brand of irrationality. To wrap up, I'll just say that it might be more complex to understand cultural irrationality than to understand individual cognitive biases, but we shouldn't shy away from seeking to understand that. We need to use better and more purposefully the research methods that we have, but also to develop new ones to measure and understand modern cultural irrationality. This is where researchers can genuinely provide insight, add value, and make a positive difference. Thank you very much. So thank you very much for that.