The Psychology Of Everyday Living

Author

Ernest Dichter (1907–1991), Austrian-American psychologist and the founder of motivational research in advertising. Trained in Vienna in the psychoanalytic tradition, he emigrated to the United States in 1938 and established the Institute for Motivational Research in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, from which he consulted for several hundred major brands.

Note: this title is sometimes confused with Donald Norman's The Psychology of Everyday Things (1988), later retitled The Design of Everyday Things. They are unrelated books.

Publication Details

The Psychology of Everyday Living. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1947. Reprinted in facsimile editions.

Description

The book is Dichter's popular statement of the position he had been developing in commercial work: that consumer behaviour is governed by motives the consumer cannot report, and that the way to reach them is the depth interview rather than the questionnaire.

Conventional market research asked people why they bought things and recorded the answers. Dichter's claim was that the answers are rationalisations produced on demand, and that the actual motives are unconscious, symbolic, often sexual, and reliably at odds with the stated reason. His method — small numbers of long, open, psychoanalytically informed interviews — was designed to reach them, and it is the ancestor of the focus group and of qualitative consumer research generally.

Dichter argued that a convertible functioned as a mistress and a saloon as a wife; that baking a cake was symbolically giving birth, and that cake mixes sold badly until manufacturers required the addition of a fresh egg, restoring the baker's participation; that cigarettes were about oral gratification and reward; that soap was about more than cleanliness. He is credited with much of the campaign framing that made a diamond an expression of commitment.

Reception

Dichter's influence in the 1950s was enormous and his reputation is contested. Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957) made him the public face of manipulative advertising, and the book's alarm — that psychological technique was being used to reach past people's judgement — established a critique that has been reissued in nearly every subsequent decade, most recently about algorithmic systems.

Academic marketing later moved sharply toward quantitative methods and treated motivational research as unfalsifiable, which it largely was: Dichter's interpretations were produced by a method that could not be checked and were frequently asserted with more confidence than the evidence carried. His practical legacy nonetheless survived the theoretical repudiation, since the qualitative interview remains standard practice.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Dichter is a useful and uncomfortable ancestor. He is the origin point of applied psychological research on consumers — the discipline that became user research, and then engagement optimization — and his career states the field's permanent question plainly: what is the difference between understanding people well enough to serve them and understanding them well enough to move them?

Read alongside Marchand on advertising as a social tableau, Goldman on commodity signs and McCracken on meaning transfer, Dichter supplies the missing piece: the practitioner's own account of how the meanings were chosen, written by the person choosing them.

Related Reading

• Roland Marchand
• Robert Goldman
• Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities
• Thorstein Veblen
• The Attention Economy