Fear, Desire, and Deception

I’ve been doing some reading in the topic of behavioral psychology this year, which seems a bit oblique to customer experience but has fundamental connections:  Customer experience is about helping people conveniently and comfortably obtain the goods and services they need, and psychology is helpful in getting a better grasp of what drives the sense of need (as well as defining what constitutes “convenience” and “comfort” in the process of obtaining it) – and while I’m still gathering wool it has already become clear that human “needs” are motivated by fear and desire, though this is often disguised by deception.

Fear and Desire

Fear and desire are easy enough to understand, as they are the two emotions that motivate the better part (and some would say all) of human activity.   Any action we undertake is motivated either to protect our default state against change or threat of change (fear) or an ambition to make an improvement in our default state (desire).  We may claim to have higher motives, but at a very fundamental level our behavior is driven by these two basic emotional states.

In the world of economics and business, strategy or tactics are based on objectives that are categorized into problem solving and opportunity exploitation … which is merely a sophisticated and self-aggrandizing way of admitting to fear and desire.   Any “problem” represents a fear, whether we are being threatened presently or perceive something that could become a threat, which is to say it is motivated by fear.   Any “opportunity” represents a desire to achieve something positive, which is to say that it is motivated by desire.

Culturally, economics and business are supposed to be very important, weighty, and sophisticated matters that are well-removed from the base and vulgar world of emotion (though a few theorists, mainly of the French school of economics, unabashedly admit emotion to be the driver of economic activity) – and so when a businessman fears something, he depicts it as a problem, describes it in non-emotional terms, and becomes irritated and irate when someone suggests that a person as urbane and sophisticated as himself is motivated by base emotions … but this is the beginning of deception, of himself and of others.

• To say “I am hungry” is to confess to a somatic sensation that causes panic – that a deficiency causes a change in the status quo, whether it is immediate physical discomfort or merely a sensation that indicates discomfort will be experienced in future, followed by death if the discomfort is not addressed.   
• To say “I need a new suit” may be motivated in part by a desire to have clothing as a survival need, but is more often motivated by a desire to have esteem – the old suit is serviceable, but out of fashion, and the desire to maintain (or obtain) the respect of others, whether as a means to gain their cooperation or merely feed a craving to be admired, drives this decision.
• To say “we need to maintain competitive advantage” is to confess the emotion of fear: that if competitive advantage is not maintained, customers will be lost, income will be lost, the firm will become unsustainable, and the source of income (which provides for survival and other needs) is being threatened if an action is not taken.

Granted, the statement that “all actions are motivated by emotions” seems like one of those outrageous statements that is generally followed by a convoluted argument to prove itself to be true – but the more I think on it, the more sense it makes and the less plausible seem arguments to the contrary.

Deception

Deception has nothing to do with the existence of motivation, but a great deal to do with the way in which the individual understands his own motivations and, especially, in the way in which he describes his motivations to others when he requires their cooperation.

The desire to appear intelligent, sophisticated, and objective leads people to invent “higher” motives for their actions.  Consider the examples above, and then consider whether you have ever heard anyone tell the truth about their motivation, at least at first.   No-one expresses their fear of death by famine, but will say “I am hungry,” “It’s time for lunch,” or “There’s a new restaurant I’d like to visit.”   Those are very indirect ways of justifying an action without admitting to the truth about one’s own motivation.

To ignore or disguise fear and desire is to misconstrue the motivation to act.  Any good strategist will attest that when you are unclear about what you are trying to achieve, your attempts to achieve it will be far less likely to succeed, except perhaps by accident.   And when helping others to achieve their goals, it is particularly important to understand their true motivations in order to provide assistance that will serve their true “need” – regardless of the words in which they leverage to disguise or deny the baser and more vulgar motives that drive them.

The emotional underpinnings of a decision become most apparent when an individual rejects a choice that would solve the alleged problem or accomplish the alleged goal on a functional level.   “Let’s go grab a hamburger” is a practical solution to the problem of “I am hungry” – but when the hungry person hesitates and suggests that the solution is unacceptable, it means that their true motivation (or perhaps a secondary motivation) is not being addressed by the proposed solution.  A hamburger will satisfy hunger, but it seems a very unsophisticated solution and the hungry person also wishes to serve their need for esteem: their base fear of hunger is coupled with a different motive to which they do not wish to admit, which is not merely to eat but for others to respect or admire their dining choice, to which end only a meal (and a venue) that matches their desired image would suffice.   They want to feel socially superior to the kind of person who eats hamburgers, and so they opt for a more sophisticated meal in a more sophisticated venue – to satisfy the craving not for food, but for esteem.

And while it is fairly easy to observe the way in which people wish to disguise their true motives while expressing their needs to others, a far more insidious problem is that they attempt to disguise their true motives to themselves.   Neel Burton’s book on The Psychology of Self-Deception provides a great deal of insight on this practice, as well as many of the mechanisms (ego defenses) by which people deceive themselves – those people who truly believe in the lies they tell themselves can be very convincing when they present the same lie to others, and it can be difficult to get to the truth of the matter – that some form of fear or desire to which they do not wish to admit is the true motivation for their actions.

Connection to Customer Experience

As usual, this meditation has been a bit of a ramble, but its connection to customer experience is straightforward:

• Fear and desire motivate human action
• Customer satisfaction is achieved only when these base motives are addressed
• People misrepresent their motives to others and themselves in order disguise their true motivation
• To successfully serve a customer, the experience practitioner must see through their deception to recognize the base motivation
• However, to please a customer the experience practitioner must play along with their deceptions – to leave their ego defenses intact while reaching past them to serve the base need

All of this seems rather convoluted and delicate, which presents a serious challenge to experience practitioners – but I have a strong sense that this is exactly the challenge we face, and understanding it such as it is, rather than such as we wish it to be, is critical to taking effective action.