The Strategy of Desire

Ernest Dichter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351473163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Ernest Dichter is famous as one of the founding fathers of motivational research. In applying the social sciences to a variety of problems, Dichter emphasized new approaches to problem solving, advertising, politics, and selling, and issues of social significance such as urban renewal, productivity, and drug addiction. As an author and corporate adviser, he used psychoanalytic theory and depth interviewing to uncover unconsciously held attitudes and beliefs. He goal was to help explain why people act the way they do and how positive behavioral change might be achieved. In The Strategy of Desire, Dichter both counters the argument that motivational research amounts to manipulation, and shows how the understanding and modification of human behavior is necessary for progress.

Dichter's survey and analysis of behavior ranges widely. He examines everyday matters of product choice, as well as such broad civic issues as voter participation, religious toleration, and racial understanding. He shows that in order to achieve socially constructive goals, it is necessary to move beyond theological exhortation, which takes an unrealistic view of human morality, as well as beyond the limits of empirically oriented social science research, which only deals in appearances. Dichter sees human action as rooted in irrational and often unconscious motivation, which can usually be uncovered if the correct approach is used. In his consumer research, he analyzes the nonutilitarian importance of objects in everyday life, as well as how products and materials become bound with emotional resonance or acquire different meanings from different contexts or points of view. Dichter shows that success depends on the satisfaction of desires and a movement beyond the ethic of work and saving. Arguing that in an increasingly technological world, progress and social harmony are materially based, he advocates a morality of the good life in which prosperity and leisure lead to greater h

1 The Mask of Behavior

Arthur Asa Berger

Every morning paper tells us that Americans ought to be more interested in education, ought to go to church more often. We are urged to do something about racial prejudice, about juvenile delinquency. We are told that artificial absolescence of products is dangerous for our economy, that inflation is caused by human demands, and that humans should co-operate in order to prevent inflation.

This is primitive, prescientific communication. We state a goal with an exclamation point after it and we think that presto! the job has been accomplished. By tearing off the mask of human behavior, by seeing humans the way they really are, by starting from the premise of their prejudices, inhibitions, and emotions, a better job can be done of lifting them up, educating them, bringing them to a higher level.

The techniques of selling, advertising, public relations, and motivational research are directly applicable, not only to commercial problems but also to those of a wider and more socially oriented purpose.

Over the last few thousand years of human existence we have concerned ourselves so much with the glorification of goals for human society that we have paid little attention to how we might achieve them. There are a number of reasons for this retarded orientation.

Physical vs. Psychological Thinking

Throughout most of human history a paradox has existed. As social animals, human beings must learn to exist with each other. Looking outside themselves they found a physical world with physical tools. This dominance of the physical world resulted logically in a search for physical means of strategy and communication. In order to protect themselves, people built walls and barricaded themselves, or used existing caves. In order to provoke fear in other people, they reached for clubs, slings, and stones. To arouse respect and admiration they adorned themselves with feathers, paint, and precious metals. Many of these physical strategy weapons persist today.

At the same time, however, men also discovered the possibility of psychological stratagems such as smiles and the first forms of symbolism and persuasion.

Today, as you look back over human history, the success and failure of states and empires have reflected both the physical and the psychological forces. To a large extent, however, it was the psychological strategy people and nations exerted upon each other which resulted in final success. We still have not written the history of ideological and psychological warfare which has taken place over thousands of years. If we did, we might discover that the ideological weapons are, in most instances, even more powerful than the purely military ones.

We are now again faced with such a dilemma in the missile race and in the competition to conquer outer space. It seems as if all the lessons of thousands of years have been forgotten again. We seem to be much more concerned with shooting our rocket a hundred or two hundred miles high than with producing the kind of ideology and the kind of psychological strategy which will result in greater happiness for mankind. We make believe that the culture which will win out is the one that has the better engineers and the more powerful missiles, rather than the one which has the more powerful ideas. That these mistakes are still being made after thousands of years is a challenging problem for the modern social scientist. It is he who at least claims to be concerned with the strategy of communication and human relationships.

Over twenty new nations have come into being during the last ten years. Each of them was motivated by a desire to be independent. In Marrakech an Arab cab driver told me (in perfect French) that it was true they had more unemployed now than while they were under French protection. “But,” he said, “they are our own unemployed.” At the same time, in a study conducted for a French dairy company, in Casablanca we found that Moroccans preferred to have the labels on milk bottles printed in French rather than in Arabic. “What is good enough for the French is good enough for us,” they said.

Each one of these new nations is confronted with many problems, problems to a large extent of a psychological nature: how to play their new roles, how to teach their citizens to accept their own authority rather than that of a foreign nation. And not only young nations but also older ones must learn to adjust themselves to new roles. The United States has failed to define its goals clearly either for itself or for the outside world. Without such definition the goals of the individual also remain unclear. We want and need answers to the questions of where we are going and why we are going there.

I believe the social sciences can help to provide those answers. But to do so, we must first see man and society as they exist, not as we would wish them to be. And we must also rid ourselves of false assumptions.

False Assumptions

Dr. Victor Victoroff, in an article called “The Assumptions We Live By” (General Semantics Magazine, Autumn 1958), describes one of the main jobs of a psychiatrist as the examination of assumptions.

The insufferable circumstance for most humans is to be confronted with a problem, particularly involving something new, unknown and to find no answer to it. The resulting discomfort provides the mind with stimulus to start thinking. To counteract this threat of the unknown, an answer must be found and characteristically it is found. Unhappily it is not necessary to furnish the right answer. The first answer which promises to work will meet the requirements and alleviate anxiety. The mind, defensive as usual, justifies its slipshod work with rationalizations and excuses, afraid that the truth beyond the guess will raise new and worse issues if discovered. Because we sometimes dread or cannot handle the truth, our honest perceptions about a mystery may have to be squelched or denied and more acceptable stereotyped hypotheses substituted.

It is difficult to view the inner man. We elaborately protect ourselves from knowing our motivations for doing things. The 20,000 people a year who kill themselves, had been unwilling or are hopelessly unable to use reasoning and they elect to blast out their brains rather than amend their false assumptions.

An example of false assumptions occurred in a study we did for a baby-food company. The problem was how best to advertise the various types of baby foods. The obvious assumption was that the best method was to promise the mother that this baby food would contribute to the health of her child. Since the approach of motivational research is unbiased and realistic in its attitude to problems of human motivations, we did not accept this assumption. Through 350 interviews which permitted mothers to talk realistically about babies, motherhood, and feeding problems, we discovered that while this mother love was partially operative, a much more tangible and effective motivation at work was the mother’s interest in making her feeding chore more convenient and pleasant. Promising her, therefore, that this particular brand of baby food would be enjoyed by her child, would be less likely to result in rejection, and would cut down feeding time considerably proved to be a more effective appeal. In the prescientific approach of daily life and economics we often assume that mother love, patriotism, morality, etc., are such basic human motivations that we fail to even consider the possibility of much more realistic and truly human motivations.

Mother-love and concern with the baby’s growth and health sound much nicer than the practical motivation of convenience. The moralist, of course, becomes shocked by such a discovery. He turns against the advertising man and against the motivational researcher and blames them for having made an appeal to the baser instincts. The dilemma we’re dealing with here is one of the most vital ones in the whole science of man.

Suppose a physician were to tell us that he knows certain pains in the body are caused by a disturbance in the digestive tract but that he is not going to concern himself with the examination of the digestive tract because it might force him to touch unpleasant, baser aspects of the human body. It is obvious that we could reject such a value system as unscientific. We certainly would not permit the doctor to move his attention to the more elegant-sounding heart functions. Why then do we condone this attitude when we are dealing with psychological factors in human motivations? It is certainly not the invention of the social scientist that a mother is more interested in herself than she is in her baby. It is a phenomenon which can easily be observed once the nicer-sounding but unrealistic assumptions of mother love have been carefully and objectively examined.

What we’re trying to do with motivational research and motivational thinking is to go back to the reality of human behavior. The Cancer Society was interested in getting our advice on how people could be persuaded to see a physician regularly in order to permit early detection of possible cancer. Everybody ought logically to be interested in regular checkups, but the fact that the Cancer Society did ask us for advice shows that this motivation, while a very logical and reasonable one, apparently was not enough. What we found was a less rational but a more human explanation. There were at least as many people who did not go for a checkup because they thought nothing was wrong with them as there were those who did not want to go because they were afraid something would be found. People in our interviews would say, “I wasted my money. After all the thorough examinations, I felt like a fool when the doctor told me that my fears were unwarranted and that there was nothing wrong with me.”

In other studies in the medical field we found again and again that certain types of people go from one physician to another until they are finally told the things they want to hear, giving them an excuse to slow down, to take a vacation, to feel pity for themselves, or arouse sympathy.

The Safety Council is very much concerned with preventing death from auto accidents. This is certainly a desirable and logical goal. Yet statistics of the holiday seasons every year show very little change in the death toll. The reason is, again, a wrong approach to the problem of safe driving. Accidents are not the result of a logical decision to speed, to pass someone, to be careless. They are the result of a series of emotional motivations. They therefore cannot be cured by logical appeals. Accident prevention must be approached emotionally. Careless driving is often caused by frustration which results in aggressive tendencies. The car becomes the instrument of destructive tendencies and often, at the same time, self-destructive tendencies.

There is little doubt that the modern car is a power symbol. It is an extension of one’s personality and an enormous multiplication of the limited power of the physical frame of the individual. Our recommendation to the people concerned with safety was to provide other outlets for these aggressive feelings and at the same time, through posters and signs, to tap people psychologically on the shoulder and say “Better not!” In a non-authoritative fashion they could be reminded to think it over at the very moment when they were about to make a wrong decision, such as passing someone on the highway.

You may have had a conference this morning trying to decide how to organize your office operation more efficiently, or you may have discussed with your wife the necessity of changing your job. In both cases, scientific knowledge of decision-making would have helped you. No ten minutes pass by in daily life without the need to make some kind of decision.

When I am asked as a psychologist why people buy, why they act as they do, I am usually expected to give my questioner a clear-cut, enumerated list of motivations and reasons. In the course of my work, an impatient advertiser has challenged me and said that all he wants to know is why his soap is not selling while his competitor’s soap is successful, although both brands are almost alike in appearance and general quality. He is saying to me: “We do not want a complicated explanation. All we want to discover is why people do not buy our product and which is the most important psychological factor which we have to consider.”

What is in the mind of an advertiser when he asks such questions? He has the feeling that the psychologist, who, after all, claims to be an expert on human nature, has a ready-made check list available which he needs only to hand over to the practical businessman so the latter can find out which of the important factors he has considered and which ones he has overlooked.

Unfortunately, the problems are not quite so readily solved. Why is it not possible to set up check lists for human motivations? To say that satisfactions of sex, hunger, need for shelter, etc. represent the basic human motivations, while not untrue, is a superficial and inaccurate attempt to explain human nature. Even if this list is more sophisticated and longer, it is misleading. The fact that you are not wearing your red tie today cannot be explained by a very simple one-two-three list of motivations. If you are a normal human being, an almost incredible number of factors exerted their influence on you, not only today but in all the preceding days, sometimes going back as far as your childhood. We must consider many conscious and unconscious factors such as the mood created by weather and the kind of people with whom you associate, the state of your health, family relations, etc. All of these things often operate and work together in such a simple choice as that between a red or green tie.

You would be amazed to find how often we mislead ourselves, regardless of how smart we think we are, when we attempt to explain why we are behaving the way we do. Our first difficulty stems from the fact that we have a great desire to behave as rational human beings, and therefore we seek rational explanations for our behavior. The truth of the matter is that we behave irrationally more often than not, and since we do not want to be reminded of our irrationality, we become blocked. We do not wish to admit the real reason for our behavior. Any person whose job is to mold public opinion, to affect the attitudes and desires of people, will fail in his task if he forgets this fundamental law of human nature. A rational explanation is always a more suspicious type of answer than one which goes back to a less pleasant but more realistic analysis of our attitudes.

A second factor which makes it difficult to get to the bottom of people’s behavior is that much too frequently we tend to judge by appearances. What would seem safer than to explain a girl’s interest in her boy friend on the basis of human desire for romance and sex? Surely here we are dealing with a basic motive. Yet many of our psychological studies have shown that even in our sexual relations we are less interested in the partner than we are in ourselves. Even in the physiological moment we are often more concerned with, and prouder of, our own prowess and ability to experience pleasure than we are with the love partner.

It is easier, however—and a more accepted pattern of human thinking—to explain events on the basis of outward appearances, to place an accepted label on an observed attitude and feel that in this fashion a real explanation has been given. Again and again I encounter this difficulty with manufacturers and advertisers when they tell me that, of course, they know why their product is bought or rejected; it is simply a problem of habit and inertia. It is often a long-drawn-out job to prove to them that such an explanation is utterly meaningless—a pseudo-explanation. It is only after such a statement is made that the real psychological research job begins. Then we must find out what kind of people the buyers are, why they were influenced by a habit, and what is the meaning of this habit which makes people stick to one particular brand, or influences them to switch to a different one.

A third difficulty in analyzing human behavior results from the fact that the majority of propagandists or practical businessmen are very proud of their product or their message. It is inconceivable to them that observation of human behavior has shown that most purchases or actions are made less because of the quality of the product than because of the satisfaction promised to the consumer’s ego. We never buy anything or take action unless there is some kind of deep psychological need for it. Often this need has very little to do with the outward appearances. Therefore, one of the most important jobs to be undertaken by the human strategist, the public official, the advertiser, the businessman, or anyone who wishes to understand why people buy or act is to become thoroughly aware of these hidden needs and aspirations.

In the chapters which follow I would, therefore, like to explore some of these psychological needs, to illuminate them through the findings of motivational research, and to indicate some of the things we know about motivating people.

2 The Discovery of Motivations

Arthur Asa Berger

It is interesting in itself that the term “motivational research” and all it stands for have become so controversial. More than twenty years have passed since I began to practice what has acquired the trade label of M.R. About a dozen books and many articles have been written about motivational research. Often the very same book or article would state that motivational research is useless, unscientific, and villainous and at the same time would passionately discuss who really originated it. I think the time has come for a little factual and unemotional clarification.

The first study I conducted is now in the library of the Institute for Motivational Research. It concerned itself with the problems of Ivory Soap. It was, I think, one of the first commercial applications of motivational thinking. The new idea involved was that effective copy appeals and some answers to the problems posed by the advertising agency might be arrived at by letting people talk at great length about their use of this soap. I decided to talk to people about such things as daily baths and showers, rather than to ask people various questions about why they used or did not use Ivory Soap. I personally conducted a hundred non-directive interviews where people were permitted to talk at great length about their most recent experiences with toilet soap. The consequent analysis of these hundred interviews r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION
• ONE: PERSUASION STARTED WITH EVE
• 1: THE MASK OF BEHAVIOR
• 2: THE DISCOVERY OF MOTIVATIONS
• 3: COMMAND OR PERSUASION
• 4: MEASURING HUMAN EMOTIONS
• 5: THE SOUL OF THINGS
• 6: WE THINK AS WE PLEASE
• 7: THE WHOLISTIC APPROACH
• TWO: STRATEGY IN A CONFLICT ERA
• INTRODUCTION
• 8: THE PSYCHO-ECONOMIC AGE
• 9: THE VISIONS BEFORE US
• 10: THE FEAR OF CHANGE
• 11: THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY
• 12: MISERY OF CHOICE
• 13: THE “BURDEN” OF THE GOOD LIFE
• 14: SEARCH FOR A GOAL
• APPENDIX I
• APPENDIX II