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Daily Survey Methods -- Narrative or Not?


Survey methods are the most widespread tools of behavioral science, and I have advocated for more use of daily surveys to study people's experiences in the context of their everyday lives. A central premise of Two Minds Theory is that Intuitive-level thinking is what actually produces behavior, so if we want to understand behavior we need to sample people's experiences at the Intuitive level. My argument has been that real-time, real-world surveys provide information closer to the occurrence of actual health behaviors, which tend to unfold on a day-by-day basis in routine contexts. And on the Two Minds Theory website I have published a list of tools that can be used for daily electronic surveys.

Yet surveys are based in language, and I have also argued that any type of conscious thought using language is a product of the Narrative system. Because surveys are really people's reports of their thoughts or feelings, can surveys really tell us anything useful about the Intuitive mind? 

When I wrote my first article about the Narrative and Intuitive minds, I wasn't actually setting out to create a theory of behavior. My goal was much more modest -- to explain a problem with daily survey methods. I had found that when I asked people "how have you felt over the past 7 days" they told me one thing; but when I asked "how do you feel today" every day for 7 days, and then averaged the answers, they were telling me something else. Logically, the average of 7 days of measurement should be identical to asking a person about their average experience over the past 7 days. So it seemed my survey methods were tapping into different aspects of people's experiences. The following figure shows just how bad the level of agreement was for different types of questions -- the shorter the bar, the lower the level of agreement between the two methods. If the two survey approaches simply generated the same information in different ways, then each of the bars should reach all the way to the right.


Furthermore, these discrepancies between the two types of survey methods turned out to have important consequences: We found that patients' motivation for treatment and their daily mood were strong predictors of whether they took their medication each day, while the same questions asked in "over the past 7 days" retrospective format were weaker predictors. And self-efficacy predicted adherence only in the "past 7 days" format, not in the "how are you feeling today" format. Clearly these two survey approaches are tapping into different kinds of information. My argument is that they actually represent the Narrative ("past 7 days") versus Intuitive ("right now") minds.

Cognitive psychologists describe a number of reasons why people's judgments about average experiences might differ from their judgments about current experiences. The primacy effect suggests that either the first or the most extreme example during a time period exerts an outsized effect on our memories of it. When I think about my last vacation, for instance, I immediately remember a great hike in Rocky Mountain National Park and a canoe excursion that were high points of the week. If I think hard I also remember the day it rained, the kids whined, and nobody seemed to be satisfied. But that part of the trip doesn't come into my "average" rating unless I really think hard; even with that in mind, my overall evaluation of the week is still that it was great. Another memory bias, the recency effect, means that I most strongly remember the things that happened at the end of the trip.

Retrospective surveys reflect the Narrative mind, because when we ask people about their "average experience" what we actually get is their beliefs about what their experience was or should have been. When we ask a question with a high level of immediacy ("right now"), there are no guarantees that we won't hear from people's beliefs, because any information stored in language is likely to tap into belief systems. That's why I have also recommended more use of sensor devices or physiological measures. But surveys that ask about immediate experience, and that are administered in the context of people's everyday lives, may be less likely to distort information through the lens of memory and belief. As a result, daily surveys can bring us closer to accurate data about the Intuitive Mind.

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