Episode 88 – How to use the Stranger in a Strange Land Technique

Guys, I think Sean might be an alien…

Picture this. You are an alien, and you have no idea what a cell phone is. Some one explains, but you have more questions. That is what we are talking about in today’s episode!

This month I am plugging the St. Louis chapter of the AMA. To become a member, you can visit https://amasaintlouis.org/.

SOURCES https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/219472

The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.

Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!

The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.

And the next best way is to share!

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Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.

TRANSCRIPT:

EPISODE 88 – HOW TO USE THE STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND TECHNIQUE

This might surprise you, but we take an awful lot of things for granted in life and just assume that they’ve always been that way when, in fact, they haven’t.

For example, when my company, the Research & Planning Group, was started back in 1983 by my former boss and mentor, David Rich, approximately 0% of the work he did for the first 10 years was done on a computer.

We didn’t have a website because the internet was still the DARPAnet and the World Wide Web didn’t exist until 1989, and even when RPG did finally build a website in the early 2000s, it didn’t do very much because the primary use of the internet during that time was not that different from consulting a phone book.

And speaking of the phone book! Do you know how important it used to be to not only have a phone book, but to be listed in one of them? It wasn’t that long ago that anywhere you went, including hotels, you’d find a phone book, and that was the primary way you’d look people up and contact them because it usually listed their phone number and mailing address.

If you changed your phone number, it would take awhile for the phone books to catch up with you, and that would either mean blissfully not getting telephone calls from solicitors or being aggravated about not getting calls from anyone.

And those calls you’d get wouldn’t be on a cell phone like today. What we now call a landline was known for decades simply as “a phone line,” and most homes only had one. People would plan their days around being available to be called on the phone, especially if an important call might come in.

Conveniences like call waiting, caller ID and voicemail were optional services, as were wireless handsets and touch tone dialing – in fact, my grandparents still had the old rotary phones in their house in the 1990s and they still worked for making calls.

But you’d better only use those rotary phones for local calls, because long distance calls were expensive, and if you wanted to save some money on them, you could go to the store and purchase long distance calling cards where you’d dial a toll free 1-800 number and then put in an even longer number for your calling card and then the number you wanted to call, all just to save a few bucks on calling people!

Today everyone recites their phone number with an area code first, but 20 years ago, they would assume you knew it unless they were on vacation and far away from home.

I could go on, and I know I’m kind of sounding like old Grandpa now talking about the good old days. But the thing is, they weren’t the good old days; they were just the different old days where way we did things required different assumptions.

We’ve gotten used to the new normal because we’re really adaptable people, but guess what? 10 or 20 years from now, there will be new ways of doing things and we’ll look back on this time as being different. And we’ll assume then, as we do now, that everything we do makes perfect sense because we know how it all works.

As a research professional, there are times where I need to get people to think outside of what they know and to reveal their assumptions about things. And one of the tricks for doing that is a creative exercise called the Stranger in a Strange Land.

I’m going to teach you how to use it today.

I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.

The Stranger in a Strange Land exercise has many other names, including the Blind Alien exercise, the Stranger exercise or the Foreigner exercise.

It’s often credited to a researcher named Alfred Schuetz who published a paper called “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology” in the American Journal of Psychology in 1944, but there’s also a little bit of the novelist Robert Heinlein in the more modern forms of the exercise, complete with the idea that the stranger, much like the Martian-born messiah Mike in the novel Stranger in a Strange Land, needs to “grok” what other people are saying through discussion.

And you though Grok was just a problematic AI platform from Elon Musk. Nope. Read your Heinlein.

No matter what you call it, the premise is always the same. The interviewer takes on the role of the Stranger, who knows nothing about anything, and the interviewee has to answer some very granular questions.

But this goes way beyond a Socratic dialogue because the interviewer isn’t trying to prove a point or uncover contradictions. Rather, the interviewer is trying to understand the assumptions underneath the language, actions, emotions, norms and shared understanding that individuals in a society have.

This can uncover some amazing insights. But I’m going to warn you that it’s also really, really tedious and it absolutely wears people out, so use it with some discretion.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say that I’m Sean the Stranger and I’m asking my friend Jason – that’s actually just me a bad mustache – to explain a simple concept to me, like “What’s a phone?”

Jason’s probably going to explain to me that a phone is a device you use to call people. And I, in my role as Sean the Stranger, am going to ask him all about what that means – what does it mean, to call someone? Are we just yelling into the phone? Calling them names? Trying to get them to do something? Oh, it means to talk. But the person who calls in the one who starts the call. OK.

So, how do you call someone? You dial their number. But how do you get their number? How do you make sure you’re calling the right one? What happens if you call the wrong number? And these phrases, “pick up” and “hang up” – what do they really mean? Oh, you mean they’re not metaphors, but they’re really how phones used to work? Interesting!

But what’s this button here? The “mute” button? That’s really weird. Why would you want to mute someone when you’re talking to them? Oh, you want to mute yourself? But why? Why would you call someone if you had things going on around you that you’d want to block out?

And speaking of this whole calling thing, can these phones also do video calls? They can? Why don’t people use video calls more often, then? When would you use a video call? Why wouldn’t you? Why do some people feel they’re intrusive? What, you mean some people are even afraid to talk on the phone without video? Why is that?

You get the idea.

But you can hear just in this dialogue how we’re taking the complex onion of a topic of “what is a phone?” and peeling it back and starting to hear already that our way of describing a phone is filled with metaphors and assumptions and vestiges of what phones used to be before we got to the form we use today.

And this dialogue didn’t even touch on some of the other topics, like how phones numbers work or what else a smartphone can do or even why people are so attached to these devices.

But if you conduct this exercise by simulating a naïve state of mind, you can often begin to uncover ideas that people take for granted but don’t really think about.

For example, let’s say that discussion spent more time talking about the mute button and why you might want to use it. It might lead to a deeper discussion about why both parties in a phone call feel the need to be able to control what the other person hears.

Is it out of consideration for others, or is it a more deceptive practice intended to mask what people are really doing? Do all people use it the same, or do some people use it differently? Does the context matter, such as the difference between talking to a family member or talking to a stranger?

There’s a lot to unpack there, and a guided discussion about that topic could yield some interesting and important behavioral insights that would never come up through a more conventional discussion.

And that’s where this exercise can be really valuable. It forces people to explain their assumptions through a spirit of understanding and helpfulness, and particularly when you’re dealing with a stale old topic where you’re hearing the same old things, a Stranger in a Strange Land exercise can help to break out of that mold.

But there is a drawback I alluded to earlier, and you perhaps could pick up on it in my dialogue – this technique is agonizing for both the research team and the interviewee because it involves so much back and forth and probing to get to anything useful.

It can aggravate people and make them feel defensive if you start poking them about things they can’t explain well, and it can also cause them to do something we never want to see happen in research, and that’s change their mind as a result of the questioning because they begin to realize their assumptions aren’t quite as rock solid as they believed they were before the questioning began.

So, we researchers tend to recommend confining this exercise to exploratory research and picking your subjects carefully.

Maybe start with friends, family members and colleagues who don’t mind being aggravated and then zero in on some insights you can then introduce into more conventional lines of questioning with strangers.

Or, pay your interviewees really well and tell them up front what you’re going to do. Just be aware they’re going to tell you what they think you want to hear so they can get paid in the end.

I hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about this exercise, and if you ever want to try it out, pick up that shiny black box and get in touch with me.

I’d be happy to pester you with questions for awhile. And who knows? You may learn something interesting in the process!

I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!