Philip Graves
Consumer behaviour consultant and author of Consumer.ology, a market researcher's critique of market research, which argues that people cannot report the real causes of what they buy.
Who they are
Graves's case is that behaviour runs on processing people cannot reach, so the reasons consumers give are constructed after the fact. His remedy is behavioural evidence: watch what people do, in the real environment. His most distinctive point is that asking people to analyse a preference can damage it, for which he relies on Wilson and Schooler's 1991 studies.
Key papers
Graves, P. (2013). Consumer.ology: The Truth about Consumers and the Psychology of Shopping, revised edition. Nicholas Brealey Publishing. First published 2010.
Key ideas
Explaining a preference can change it. See Reasons Analysis.
His inference that a long interview is worse than a short one follows from the evidence but has not been tested directly.
Sources
- Graves, P. (2013). Consumer.ology. Read in full by this publication, with a reliability audit.