Nine Hundred Interviews Later, I Stopped Believing the Reason People Give

I have sat through roughly nine hundred research interviews, and the single most consistent finding across all of them has nothing to do with any product. It is that when you ask someone why they chose something, you get a fluent, coherent, confident account, and that account is constructed at the moment you ask.

I want to be careful with this because the obvious reading is cynical and wrong. People are not lying. They are doing what everyone does, including me: producing an explanation that fits the outcome, using reasons that are available and respectable, with total sincerity. The account is a real thing about the person. It is just not a recording.

The clearest demonstration I have seen came from a study where we watched people choose, then asked. A participant spent eleven seconds on a page, clicked the second option, and later explained that they had chosen it because it had the feature they needed. The feature was listed on the third option and not the second. They were not embarrassed when this came up; they were surprised, and then they produced a new reason, equally confident. That sequence — surprise, then immediate seamless replacement — is the thing I have seen hundreds of times and cannot unsee.

What produces the actual choice, as far as I can tell from watching rather than asking, is a much smaller and more mechanical set of things. What was first. What was already familiar. What required the fewest decisions to complete. What somebody they know had mentioned in the last month. None of these are respectable reasons and almost nobody offers them unprompted, because “it was the default” is not a story about a competent person choosing well.

The practical consequence in my work is that I stopped asking why and started asking what happened. Not “why did you pick this tool” but “walk me through the day you signed up.” The second question produces reconstruction rather than justification, and reconstruction has gaps and hesitations in it, and the gaps are where the real answer lives. A person who says “I think someone had mentioned it, I can’t remember who” has told me more than one who gives me three clean reasons.

The consequence for myself has been harder. I now assume that my own account of my own decisions is the same kind of artefact, and there is no vantage point from which to check it. What I do instead is write the reason down before the decision, in a sentence, and look at it afterwards. Not to score myself — to see how often the written reason and the remembered reason differ. Over about two years of doing this the answer is roughly a third of the time, and the remembered version is always more flattering and more coherent.

The thing I would leave anyone with is not distrust of other people. It is a specific and useful suspicion of the moment when an explanation arrives easily. A reason that comes instantly, in whole sentences, with no hesitation, is the one most likely to have been assembled for the occasion. The true ones tend to be halting, partial, and slightly embarrassing.