Insights Can Guide Governments

This does not mean just survey data It has now been proven that insights about subconscious motivations can be accurately inferred from privacyprotected analyses of peopleamp8217s content consumption through the media as will be shown here In the future innovative researchers will use a combination of stated and observed behavior to distill testable hypotheses and to verify these by scientific experimentationDecisionmaking is subconsciousHarvard neuroscience professor Gerald Zaltman in 2005 upended market research by announcing that 95 of decisionmaking is subconscious and that surveys tap only the verbal part of the conscious mind A company I cofounded with Bill McKenna Research Measurement Technologies responded by developing research based on analysing media content consumption The data drove a threetiered taxonomy of 15 Motivational Types breaking down into 86 Need States and finally into 265 memes called DriverTags A few months ago the Advertising Research Foundationamp8217s Cognition Council found that the Motivation data accounted for 48 of sales over a fiveyear period in three large FMCG categories The same ARF Cognition Council study found that buyers were moved more by monetary motivations than by altruistic motivations This insight could have helped one predict that the economy would have much more impact on the US midterm elections than protecting democracyThis leads back to our central premise that insights developed holistically to include subconscious motivations revealed by content choice behaviour can help guide government decisionmaking and also help candidates with tangible and innovative solutions win elections Today a larger problem is that political candidates and elected officials are not prone to developing innovative solutions Instead they feed back to the public the news that they are concerned about the same pain points as the populace stopping short of offering new solutions An insightbased approach could lead to developing solutions and creative executions communicating at conscious and subconscious levels to persuade public support to cautiously and objectively pretest new solution ideas This is admittedly a huge departure from the way the human race has been doing things throughout hisandherstoryFeeble methods of governanceWhy is the world in such turmoil today Our latest inventions especially in the media and weapons categories have exceeded the bounds of our feeble methods of governance of large populations I say amp8220feebleamp8221 because even in our democracies we embrace the false wisdom of political parties which institutionalise biases as being sane things to rely upon Biases in favor of reaching for the stars progressivism versus holding on to what we have conservatism Greek philosophy long ago attempted to sway the human race away from accepting dichotomania in place of reasoned balance integrating awareness of all the desired variables They failed and we continue to carry on with the failureThe shift to the right which The Economist by its methodology calculates hit the US in 2016 Belgium in 2014 France and Greece in 2010 and Italy before 2006 may be attributed to any number of hypothetical causes and probably each one contains a germ of truth When people fear where the future may be going they subconsciously lean toward amp8220strong menamp8221 maybe women who speak with forceful confidence In the US the Republican party knows how to project strength and the Democratic party continually winds up conveying weakness failing to document its special efforts and accomplishments Insights and analytics combining quant qual and privacyprotected methods which infer subconscious leanings based on content consumed andor neuroscience discoveries can change the future by helping politicians break out of the old moulds and use science and imagination to reach new unique solutions and sell themThe education systems of all countries need to be completely reimagined We are not teaching the art of thinking This is a dangerous missing link We grow up in a materialistic culture in which spiritual values are perceived to be in conflict with science This alone would tip the subconscious toward money and hedonism as the sole motivations in life and in our culture money and power are closely linked By educating people on how to think the other motivations aspiration love creativity selfknowledge selftranscendence will light up as people learn how to know themselves and to differentiate between oneamp8217s true self vs oneamp8217s ego Insights and analytics can help governments grow up to the level of being able to make decisions based upon more true information and less upon opinions frozen perceptions and enshrined biasesWe in our modest profession can contribute much more than we realizePreviously published by Research World on November 9 2022Click the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet

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Bill Harvey

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