You're projecting onto your audience. Research can help you stop.
It’s hard to know what other people think and feel. We’re pretty bad at understanding our own emotions and motivations, and even worse at other people’s. The solution our brains have arrived at is projection. In popular culture we treat this like a bit of unserious psychobabble, but people really do unknowingly assume that other people have the same thoughts and desires and emotions as they do.
Evolutionarily, this is a pretty elegant solution to the problem of understanding other minds. We spent most of human history in the company of smallish bands of relatives and neighbors, so it was a safe assumption that other people thought a lot like we did. We would have had similar objectives, constrained by similar environments, and a similar understanding of the people and places around us.
In the modern world, we do just as much projection, but spend far less time in the company of close family and friends. Depending on the population of your city or the industry you work in, you interact or collaborate with people from different parts of the state, country, or globe. In that case, it’s not a reasonable assumption that the contents of other people’s brains are much like ours. But we do it all the time without noticing, and evidence suggests we continue to do so even when we're made aware that we're doing it.
Here’s an example of how projection can go wrong. My colleague Erin Norman and I noticed that many policy debates use language and claims that only make sense to certified wonks. We guessed that part of the problem was that policy analysis tends to rely on economic logic, and that policy wonks understand economics way better than the average person.
So we gave a three-question economics quiz to a nationally representative sample of US voters surveyed as part of SPN’s State Voices Poll. Respondents selected an answer from four multiple-choice options. The questions were taken from the Council for Economic Education's Economic Literacy Quiz. (Test your economic literacy with the full version here.) The idea was to get an approximation of how well the average US voter understands basic economic concepts.
The average score was 46%. America may be failing economics. And when policy debates rely on economic reasoning on the relationship between supply and demand or the effects of regulation, incentives, or competition, the average American may not understand the claims being made.
We gave the same quiz to attendees of SPN’s Annual Meeting, which is a gathering of people who care a lot about public policy. Not just analysts, but communications, marketing, government affairs, and other professionals from all 50 states, with a shared passion for solving people’s problems with better policy.
The average score for Annual Meeting attendees was 91%.* And this is exactly the problem. If you understand economics far better than the average person, you are very likely to project that knowledge onto other people. You assume that they know what you know and think how you think. And when you tell them what’s right or wrong about a particular policy in economic terms, even highly intelligent people will have no idea what you’re talking about. Furthermore most people will not devote the time or effort required to follow a complex, multi-step argument laid out in a public affairs or advocacy campaign.
This happens in all kinds of areas in which people have expertise that their audience lacks. Whether it’s accounting expertise, baseball trivia, or religious doctrine, assuming that other people know what we do makes it hard to communicate with them, market to them, and generally influence them.
Research is invaluable to avoid projecting onto our audiences. And it doesn’t have to be expensive. Here are some ideas at varying levels of complexity and cost:
Cheap, fast, and easy: Run tests using free survey software (Qualtrics offers free accounts) and inexpensive but high-quality panels (check out Prolific and CloudResearch). You can use quizzes like we did to find out how well your audience understands a topic like economics, or your can measure their understanding of your product category (skin care products, car repair, tax software) or a policy (education savings accounts, certificate of need laws, zoning regulations). You can also test their understanding, recall, preference for a given message.
Slightly harder and more expensive: If you have more money and time, virtual or in-person focus groups or one-on-one interviews let you hear how people think through your issue. The beauty of interview research is that it’s open ended, rather than fixed like surveys. Respondents can tell you things that you never would have thought to ask. Maybe you’re using a phrase people don’t understand. Maybe people are mixing up your policy proposal with one from a few years ago. Surveys won’t reveal this, but open-ended, qualitative research will.
State of the art: If you have even more money and a bit of lead time, large-scale studies with representative samples can establish a benchmark for how people view an issue. Beware of spending too much here, as your goal is typically to understand how most people think rather than precisely evaluate public opinion on a given issue.
We all engage in projection. Mostly it allows us to get through daily life effectively interacting with the people around us. But if you have something complex to communicate, projection can be your enemy. Don’t assume your audience knows and thinks like you do.
*If you’re concerned that the second sample was self-selected and therefore non-random, you raise an excellent point. If we were publishing these results, we would statistically correct for this issue. While the 91% mean score likely overestimates the true economic knowledge of Annual Meeting attendees, I'm confident that the results are directionally correct and that meeting attendees understand economics significantly better than the average American voter.