3 Grandmother Research
(Modified on 2026-08-11)
651 words
Finding the Obvious
A common complaint about empirical research is that it merely demonstrates what we already know: “Your research doesn’t tell us anything new: my grandma could have told you that!” It’s true: perhaps 95% of research projects merely confirm people’s pre-existing intuitions. So why bother going through all the expense and effort of engaging in empirical research?
Suppose for the moment that your grandmother really did have excellent intuitions. We design an experiment, and then instead of actually running the experiment, we visit grandmother and ask her what she thinks will happen. In perhaps 95% of cases, she gets it right.
However, the problem is not that our intuitions are mostly right. The problem lies in the small percentage (say 5%) of our intuitions which are wrong. In some cases, our intuitions are truly misguided. The only way we can discover which intuitions are wrong is by carrying out empirical research.
Incidentally, it shouldn’t be surprising that human intuition is generally good. If we didn’t have good intuitions about the world, humans would long ago have become extinct. Moreover, we can’t possibly carry out experimental tests for all of our intuitions. As the phenomenologist, Martin Heidegger noted, we are “thrown” into the world: we aren’t given a chance to “figure it out” before we start living.
Examples
As music tech engineers, you might one day work designing software or hardware systems for musicians to interact with, like sequencing software or MIDI controllers. Maybe you one day work on a project to add features to an existing instrument—perhaps making it easier to play arpeggios. It might be pretty obvious that the new feature is a big improvement. However, before your company ships out this new feature, you’ll want to do some formal user testing—just in case! If the feature is obviously good, your user/testers are probably going to love it and it might feel like a waste of time (especially in retrospect). But you never know—maybe you like the feature, but most of your users hate it because they aren’t interested in playing arpeggios, only solo lines.
As a musician, you hear the world profoundly differently than non-musicians. In our music perception and cognition course (MUSI 6001), we have students design simple music perception experiments. Our students are mostly musicians, and like other musicians, they tend to radically overestimate non-musicians’ ability to perceive musical distinctions and details. For example, a musician might think that a minor third interval and major third interval, played melodically, sound obviously different. But you’d be surprised! What’s obvious to you might be totally opaque to others.
When I was in graduate school, we conducted some experiments regarding lyric intelligibility—i.e., how easy it is to understand the lyrics in music. One hypothesis we tested was that rhyming words make it easier to understand lyrics. Seems like a slam dunk right? Why even bother? Well, our results were not consistent with this hypothesis! Our participants were more likely to get the words wrong when they rhymed. We, as a community, might have gone on assuming that rhymes improve lyric intelligibility, because it seemed so obvious. However, only by actually putting it to the test was there an opportunity to call that obvious intuition into question.
Mantras
Unfortunately, there is a price to pay for doing the research—and not just the cost of the research itself. We must also suffer the indignity that 95% of our work will seem unnecessary to others! In doing research, be prepared for the fact that many other researchers will regard your efforts as naive and useless. Haters gonna hate! The longer you engage in research, however, the greater the likelihood that you will move beyond commonplace intuitions and assemble a story that people will find truly surprising, informative, and useful.
Our next mantra reminds us that our work is worthwhile, even if it can appear boring:
Many research questions might have answers that appear obvious—at least to some people! It can still be worthwhile to explore these questions anyway, to validate the intuition or perhaps to disprove it!