How Drag and Drop Technology is Improving the Data Quality of System 1 Tools
By Todd Trautz, Chief Innovation & Solutions Officer | March 10, 2020
According to behavioral scientists, emotions often overwhelm logical human decision-making.
It means that understanding how consumers Feel, as well as Think and Behave is essential to delivering customer connections that grow your business. Businesses must evaluate research issues through both System 1 and System 2 lenses to capture a holistic view of consumer understanding.
Implicit Association measurement
Implicit Association Testing (IAT) is a psychological test designed to measure ‘implicit attitudes’, the underlying by-products of past experiences that influence how consumers Feel about something. These cognitive processes are always present in the background of our decisions, even when we are not aware of them.
IAT methodologies are designed to reveal the automatic associations we hold by asking the participant to rapidly sort stimuli to bipolar constructs. Respondents are given little time to fully process their decision, instead relying on the gut reaction and subconscious System 1 association they hold towards that stimuli.
IAT provides a window into human thought-processes revealing how our dominant System 1 brain makes rapid behavioral decisions.
Psychologists have been using these tests for almost 40 years. When implicit attitude tests are compared against explicit responses provided, time and time again, implicit tests have proven themselves to be more accurate predictors of behavior.
They are an essential tool in uncovering what, and how, to better influence consumer decision-making.
Improving data quality and accuracy
Maru/Matchbox’s consumer research methodology operates at the intersection of behavior and emotion and our proprietary IAT tool has been helping clients to uncover how consumers Feel for the past year.
But our latest innovation brings fresh-thinking, an enhanced respondent experience and improved data quality to our IAT approach.
Drag and drop interfaces are extremely popular across gaming, mobile and tablet platforms. We’ve taken a similar approach to our latest IAT interface, utilizing a similar drag and drop environment to eliminate user and UX biases on the test.
How it works
Regardless of device or screen size used by the respondent, the stimuli orientates halfway between the two answer choices. As the stimuli appears, the respondent must drag and drop into one of the two answer choice boxes.
The combination of drag and drop and device agnostic rendering of stimuli creates a standardized test environment, which, in turn, improves the accuracy of data as there is no skewing of results related to the device used.
A better survey experience for respondents
The new drag and drop IAT interface is also a much improved experience for respondents.
Now when respondents place stimuli into one of the two answer options, they’re greeted with a successful task completion message, or ‘green tick’.
By visually reinforcing that the sorting task is ‘correct’, we’re creating a sense of confidence amongst respondents in the exercise. Positively reinforcing each sorting task means respondents are less inhibited, which, in turn, increases the speed of sorting.
And as IAT is reliant on the speed of response, faster sorting provides us with even more accurate subconscious data.
Uncovering your customers’ implicit attitudes is just a click away
Our improved and updated IAT approach is available as part of any project, as well as available as standard as part of our collection of expertly-design research solutions on our fully-flexible insights service portal, Maru/HUB.