When research turns into promotion – the Mere Measurement effect

Vicki Morwitz from the Stern School, New York, and Gavan Fitzsimons of the Wharton School, Pennsylvania, discovered something quite odd when they asked 40,000 people about the strength of their desire to purchase a new car: Simply asking about the strength of desire disproportionately increased action.

That wasn’t supposed to happen.

The actual rates of car purchase among the group in the following six months shot up to over 35% above average.

Simply by measuring the state, they changed it.

Mere Measurement effect

This effect’s been dubbed the Mere Measurement effect (even though there’s nothing mere about its effect). It tells us that our response to an initial-intent question changes our subsequent evaluations by activating an existing attitude – and that attitude remains accessible and pronounced for some time. However, if there were no existing inclination one would not appear. Much like a countryside path – if you have a groove, you’ll get a rut. So of those 40,000 with existing inclination to purchase, their attitude was amplified. This amplification of intent is not solely about purchase: Greenwald, Carnot, Beach, and Young saw the probability of voting increase by 25% for people who had been asked about their voting intention for the following day.

AMA code of ethics

These are big numbers – it questions the foundations of market research:

‘The American Marketing Association (AMA) code of ethics clearly segregates the conduct of marketing research from any form of sales or opinion-influencing activity.’

I think we can safely say that ‘opinion-influencing activity’ is the definition of the Mere Measurement effect.

Oops.

Frequently advertised brands

And it gets even more fascinating. After 40,000 people were exposed to the survey question in the Fitzsimons and Morwitz study, it became apparent that car owners increase their likelihood of purchasing from their current manufacturer, while those who don’t own a car increase their likelihood of purchasing from any one of the frequently advertised brands.

Frequently. Advertised. Brands. A good reason to get out an advertise, no doubt.

The Mere Measurement effect was evoked from a ‘simple’ question that puts the receiver as the main actor in a scenario. Imaging other people in scenarios is not as effective in changing subsequent actions – this is why ‘your new car’ is so powerful. But what happens if we ask a more nuanced or complex question?

Positive, negative, and avoidance outcomes

Nuanced questions change outcomes too (as if you hadn’t guessed), but it depends on how the question is structured: imagining positive, negative, and avoidance outcomes affects outcomes differently.

A positive statement more readily accesses an existing attitude than a negative statement, so your ‘mere’ question will get more of a response. ‘Positive’ usually translates as aspirational – like ownership of a new car (‘Are you going to buy a new car?’). But positive aspiration is a little tricky to elicit for products or services that require an obvious side- or down-shift – the products and services that are seen as negative.

A positive or neutral statement seems to work best when asked ‘with the grain’ to keep mental calculations and translations uncomplicated. For instance, don’t ask how many times do you put the bins out per month? if the ‘with the grain’ answer is once every fortnight. Don’t ask how many times per month do you have a haircut? when the ‘with the grain’ question is how many weeks do you wait before you next visit? In short, don’t put any unnecessary calculations in there.

A negative statement, like can you see yourself not eating sugary foods?, seems to have two characteristics: our ‘imagined state’ is poorly constructed because it requires a greater load on working memory than imagining positive or alternative scenes; that which we manage to construct in our ‘imagined state’ frequently goes AWOL. Information about ‘not doing’ something seems to be treated as casually as a trivial Post-It note. Behaviour is rarely changed.

An ‘avoidance’ construction can help in this case: ‘What is the likelihood you’ll avoid X?’ It seems much easier for us to imagine ourselves performing the necessary actions to avoid something rather than the negative construct of not doing something.

But, however constructed, we tend to want the shortest route, so we ignore the negative ‘imagined state’ and grab for positive, or, failing that, avoidance. In this sense our imagination is like a river trying to find the shortest path to lower ground, where the shortest path is a positive construct. The only exception is if the ‘shortest path’ is a negative statement that chimes with an existing negative attitude (a socially undesirable behaviour – such as murder), because it acts much like a positive statement in the sense that ‘not doing it’ is good in a socially acceptable way.

Both avoidance and positive questions are more palatable and memorable. They do more than prime behaviour – they create an implementation imprint that endures after the question that affects our evaluation and subsequent behaviour.•

‘Simply asking’ is one of the most inexpensive ways of communicating, and it seems the Mere Measurement effect is anything but ‘mere’.

You weren’t aware? All you had to do was ask.

Image by Freepik