The launch of Google Calendar two weeks ago was greeted with well deserved acclaim, but some of it sounded a little like idolatry to me. On the first day of its release, one blogger praised its stability relative to other online calendars. Statements about stability of software with less than one day of use seems odd but not surprising given the high expectations that people have towards Google these days.
Expectations can have a profound effect towards biasing the opinions of a customer. This has been demonstrated scientifically many times in many fields of study.
In my field of expertise, the phenomenon of expectation affecting customer satisfaction was made starkly clear in the following experiment at the University of Iowa. Hearing impaired patients were told that they would be wearing two different hearing aids: for one month they would wear a pair with old analog technology and for another month they would wear a pair with new digital technology. In fact, both pairs of hearing aids were the same—there was no difference in technology between the two pairs worn for one month each. After trying both sets of identical aids, patients overwhelmingly reported a strong preference for the aids they had been told had new digital technology. They commented to the effect that, “Everything sounded so much clearer with the digital aids,” and,”My wife says that I understand her much better with these new aids.” Remember that there was no difference between the pairs of aids and subjects should have had no preference for one over the other—the only difference was in the subjects’ expectations.
We experience this impact of expectation on our assessments throughout our normal lives. If the political candidate that you favor stumbles in a debate, well then they simply were human and can be excused for a slight slip-up. If the candidate that you hate stumbles, however, then they have just demonstrated once again that their incompetence makes them unfit for office.
This is a confound that my departments have had to address whenever testing improvements to products: how to ensure that test subjects aren’t preferring the new product simply because they know that it is newer and therefore presumably better than previous technology. Any company that tests products needs to be aware of this potential contamination to their product testing.
A feedback effect can also occur in these situations when the product being assessed is human performance, where expectations not only affect the subjective judgments of the assessor but also affect the performance of who is being judged. This was demonstrated in the Pygmalion in the Classroom study.
In 1966, researchers investigated the expectation phenomenon by giving a meaningless test called “The Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition” to young students and then telling their school that some students scored exceptionally high which indicated that they will excel over the next few years at school. One year later, the researchers found that the students who were marked as exceptional did, in fact, do exceptionally well, with higher IQ test scores than the others and better subjective assessments by their teachers. Keep in mind that the students designated as exceptional were selected randomly with no relation to the students’ actual abilities. Most likely what happened was that the teachers treated students differently based on their expectations, and the teachers assessed the quality of those students’ work differently also based on those expectations. I’ve read nothing about the moral regret of these researchers towards the students who received less attention from their teachers because they were not anointed by the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition. Be wary of such high-falootin’ tests being used in your workplace and their impact on your bosses assessment of your ability.
These studies and others suggest that a company’s reputation affects customer satisfaction with their products—consumers often don’t judge technology on its own merits. Much has been written about the halo affect of the iPod on the rest of Apple’s product line, and about Apple’s dominant market share in portable music players despite excellent products from their competitors. The new dual-boot Macs are going to convert a lot of Windows-only users simply because their expectation of a better experience using Windows on the Apple platform, whether it is true or not.
Finally, any company who has a product that finds it competing against a new Google offering—or against a product from any company with the golden reputation of Google right now—has got to be worried even if they know that they have a better product. A bad reputation is difficult to get rid of and a great reputation is difficult to compete against. Note that this is different from when startups used to fear Microsoft entering their product space: they weren’t worried about a better product from Microsoft, just that Microsoft’s business tactics would strangle them.
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