In 2005, everyone told Nokia they wanted phones with more features. Longer battery life. Better cameras. Sturdier builds. Nokia listened. They delivered exactly what people said they wanted.
Then Apple released the iPhone — a phone with worse battery life, a fragile screen, and half the features — and everyone bought it instead.
People weren't lying, exactly. They were being polite. They were giving the answers they thought made them sound reasonable, practical, responsible. The answers that fit the question being asked.
But desire doesn't work that way. Desire is inconvenient. It's irrational. It's often embarrassing to admit out loud, especially to a stranger with a clipboard.
Ask people what they want in a restaurant and they'll tell you healthy options, reasonable prices, good service. Watch where they actually eat and it's the place with the ridiculous burgers, loud music, and Instagram-worthy interiors.
The gap between stated preference and revealed preference is where most research goes to die.
Because the truth is, we don't know what we want until we see it. Or more accurately — we know what we want, but we don't have the vocabulary to express it until someone shows us the thing we didn't know was possible.
Henry Ford understood this. "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
Steve Jobs understood this. He didn't ask. He showed.
So what do we — the non-Fords and non-Jobs — do instead? We watch. We listen to what people complain about, not what they claim to want. We notice where they spend their time, their money, their attention — not where they say they will.
And we trust that when people are being polite, they're being honest about their manners, not their desires.