Schröder as opposed to Boole, was very interested in duality: concepts needn’t be either or, could very easily be and and. This is very well expressed in his famous cat dilemma. Unfortunately I was’t able to find reference to Schröders cat dilemma on the internet. But I can describe it briefly: you are looking at a device with a cat in it. If you open the device, you could kill the cat by opening it. But it is also possible that the opening of the de device did not kill the cat, that it was already dead. You don’t know after opening: therefore the cat is in two states at the same time: dead and living. You think this is bullshit? Won’t blame you, if you think so, but actual this dilemma is a ‘macro’ description of a very normal phenomenon in quantum mechanics.

This is a parallel for research. The research itself interferes with reality. It is not possible to separate research and action. The outcome of the research is not revealing an ‘objective’ truth that is out there to be discovered (such as looking for a pebble in the ground). The outcome is not just there, it is formed by research. This concept is common knowledge in physics, but it is often ignored in social research. Look at the ‘Obama’ story. Asking questions about ‘whom will you vote for’ presuppose that you as a respondent sort of know that: you just have to look within your own mind to find the ‘Obama’ or the ‘MacCain’ pebble. As if it is a simple notion. In fact the respondents do not really know what they will be voting for when the ‘real decision’  has to be made. You could argue that all of the voters are in several states, and that the chances of the one state over the other can be bigger in one person than in the other. On top of that, the research results are absolutely influencing the endstate: if I can trust that Obama wins, the chances might increase for his opponent or the other way round. Research is part of the reality, can’t be separated from it. This is where quantum mechanics meet politics.

In quantum mechanics the concept of ’several states’ is quite normal, the system is forced to chose one state as a consequence of the research (the system being watched). No ‘true or false’  in quantum mechanics: true, false ánd something in between. Marketing directors have a big problem with this concept in their consumers. It is more comfortable and easy to understand opinions as ‘fixed state’ and ’simple’ items. So often the research can be viewed as opening the cats door, killing the cat as a consequence.

If I remember it well there was the problem of research intervention: by looking at the one value, you influenced the other. At the time I was taught this principle in highschool (half seventies af the previous century) my teacher had to spend quite some time to explain this counter intuitivie notion. We discussed the consequences lengthy. Expecially the notion that we had to forget the idea of particles as ‘matter’  with a defined place and velocity. We should – he claimed – see it otherwise: there is a certain chance that the particle is at a defined place, but the particle cannot be ‘forced’ to a precision of 1: so of you measure one of the variables more precise, the other variable will therefore be less precise. There is no way of forcing it to certaincy. In other words: uncertaincy, not certaincy is the base of our universe. I have never been able to look at ‘large matter’ again after this, without thinking: so this is not matter, it is probability. It is the clustering of many probabilities, the sum of chance, clustering of nothing tangible.

I see a clear comparison to research as we know it, and to marketing as we know it. Marketeers like to see consumer behaviour as a sum of individual actions that can be completely understood. Either you like the I-Phone, and you buy it, or you hate it and you don’t. Either you are ‘looking for certaincy’ and you buy a Volvo, or you are looking for kicks and you buy an Alpha Romeo. The big theme in marketing and marketing research is about ‘understanding consumers’, and the the notion of ‘understanding’ is a bit in the way we understand Newtonion phsysics: the path of the bullit is completely predictable, we understand all forces at stake and basically we know everything.

I state that this is a completely wrong understanding of consumer behaviour. I think that consumer behaviour is better understood if you describe it as a fundamental uncertain concept. The more you try to look at it, the more it will escape you. I haven’t got the time to dive into this deep, but I will give some basic thoughts:

• in order to ‘understand’ consumers and behaviour we introduce concepts for measurement. Mostly questions. These concepts are simplifying reality in an extreme way;
• the questions act as influencers. So the info you get is a reaction to the question, rather then insight in the behaviour;
• concepts of understanding in all of the marketing models I know of, force the consumers to be in one state only: either safety seeking or not. Human mind is better explained as being in several states at the same time (and looking for safety and for fun, and optimising the combination for every situation, changing the combination for different contexts)