Do You Know What You Want?
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In the 1970s, the city of New York hired urban anthropologist William Whyte as a consultant for building public spaces such as parks and sidewalks. In the course of his work, Whyte found something quite remarkable. For one such project-building a park-he asked people what they would like to see in their neighborhood park. Imagine, for a moment, that you are a participant in one of Whyte's surveys.
How would you respond?
Whyte found that most people want the same things: a little pond in the middle of the park, lilies and ducks floating on it, birds and bees, trees, little squirrels, etc. In short, they would like to see nature in full bloom, a tranquil paradise devoid of human beings, in their neighborhood park.
But is that what they truly want?
Here's where it gets interesting: Although people say they would like to get away from other humans in a park, it turns out they don't actually want to. How do we know this? Let's look at the most popular features of a park: people tend to congregate where other people gather. People intuitively feel that they would like parks to be un-crowded, but they end up frequenting parks that are, in fact, crowded. Yogi Berra's famous quote, "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded," makes sense in light of Whyte's findings. It succinctly captures the idea that people think they would be turned off by crowds, but they are wrong.
What does this tell us about human nature? Two things: First, we are social animals. Second, it also tells us that we often don't know what we really want.
Re-read that sentence, because it is one of the most important insights you can have about yourself: We often don't know what we really want.
If you are a skeptic, and some of you are, your first question may be: How generalized is this idea, that people don't really know what they want?
The answer is complicated, but it would appear that people are less clear about their "higher-order" needs (see Maslow's hierarchy of needs below). That is, people seem to know what they want to eat, whether they would like the taste of cola or water at the present moment. Yet we are lost when it comes to issues pertaining to personal growth (what do I really want from life?) or relationships (what characteristics are important in a life-partner?).
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
If you still need convincing, consider the following set of confirmed findings, all of which point to the idea that we know so little about what we want.
1. One of the biggest sources of daily stress is commute time-the longer you commute, the more stressed you are; yet, people do not weigh this aspect commensurately in deciding where to live. Invariably, people (in the U.S. at least, and the trend seems to be catching on in places like India as well) end up living in larger houses far away from work, when, in fact, they would lead happier lives if they lived closer to work in a smaller house. (See this article from The New Yorker)
2. When it comes to important decisions, we want to make them after considerable deliberation; this makes sense, at least at first blush. However, findings show that people would, in fact, be better off not deliberating-especially if we want an emotional outcome from the decision, as opposed to a functional one. Thus, for instance, we would be better off going with the gut when purchasing jewelry; but when purchasing a sprinkler system for the backyard, it's best to deliberate. (See the PT post showing we are prone to over-thinking our decisions.)
You may, of course, remain unconvinced about whether you know what you truly want. You may wonder how you-or anyone else, for that matter-goes about making decisions if they don't know what they want. I will tackle that question in another post.
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