The rabbi

Editor’s note: Hy Mariampolski is managing director at QualiData Research Inc., New York.

There is a special kind of dominant focus group participant that I call the rabbi. They can be of any religion, any color, bearded or clean-shaven, male or female. Rabbis tend to be on the elderly side, though age is not their primary qualification. What distinguishes a rabbi is their unassailable, recognized authority with respect to the subject under discussion.

The views of even very authoritative respondents need to be balanced in group discussions. Rabbis are not infallible. Even in the Jewish tradition, they have no special religious status; any layman may perform sacred rituals. Rabbis are distinguished primarily by their extensive learning and leadership qualities.

Most dominant participants come to group experiences with some degree of insecurity, anxiety or arrogance. Consciously or unconsciously, they view the group discussion as an opportunity to dramatize themselves. Dominants may have pretensions of authority but, in reality, they are just loud, bombastic and boastful. They behave competitively toward moderators and dismissively toward peers. Their potential for spreading dismay and invalidity needs to be tightly contained.

Rabbis are different. They may present themselves as shy and reserved or they can be as overbearing as any other type of dominant participant. What distinguishes them, however, is the behavior of other group participants, who become respectful, deferential, and even obsequious toward a rabbi.

In the highly technical discussions I often lead among medical specialists and senior corporate executives, rabbis appear without being announced. The most stringent recruitment procedures cannot always control the personalities and inner relationships among participants who arrive for a session.

In a focus group of pediatricians conducted several years ago in New Jersey, their rabbi had just published an important article in a leading medical journal. Group participants - several meeting him for the first time - were eager to hear his opinions before rendering their own. Similarly, in an extended creativity group I conducted with optometrists in Los Angeles, it was not apparent until about midway into the session that the friendly gent to my right had been the teacher of almost every other participant in the group over his career. That could not have been predicted from the participants’ wide age distribution; some were about the same age as his, while one was at least 20 years younger.

Rabbis cannot always be identified at the recruitment stage; however, their agreement to participate may sometimes be used by recruiters to entice others to attend market research sessions. In a Connecticut focus group on an important new corporate management initiative, the CEOs, CFOs and COOs in attendance were all eager to hear from the “brand-name” CFO who was the draw for their own participation. They, indeed, were thinking through their own reactions to the new corporate policies being demanded by government authorities and wanted to explore alternatives valid for their own businesses. Like many encounters with a rabbi in the group, the session was less an opportunity to hear various opinions than to observe the process of opinion formulation in vivo.

Client reactions

Backroom client reactions can vary widely. Sometimes client observers are as enchanted as everyone else in the front room. They may be tempted to tune out everyone but the superstar, while congratulating the qualitative research consultant and recruiter for obtaining the cooperation of someone with such eminence. In one case, during a Silicon Valley session with telecom programming specialists, the clients called me to the back room to ask whether it would be ethical to offer a job to a group participant whose depth of knowledge and experience, amply demonstrated in the discussion, apparently qualified him for an open senior position with their R&D organization.

Often clients confuse rabbis with conventional dominators and incorrectly urge moderators to control or suppress their participation. This can be a very dangerous course to take because other participants may define the moderator’s behavior as rude or ignorant. Besides, some attendees may feel that the implicit social contract that impelled their own participation is being violated.

In point of fact, most often, client observers may miss what is going on completely because the rabbi’s influence is being exercised subtly through a wink, a raised eyebrow and other facial gestures. Otherwise, participants may be unwilling to assert strong opinions until after the rabbi has spoken. The best way to observe the rabbi’s effect is through their reflections in others rather than through anything they do to exercise authority.

Culture may be the source of the roles rabbis are playing. Many cultures maintain strong norms for appropriate authority behaviors in groups. Among Japanese respondents, for example, the most influential person in a focus group may be the quietest person sitting at the table, as I learned several years ago while interviewing the American divisional leadership of a major Japanese bank.

It is also wrong to assume that the rabbi is never vulnerable to challenge. Sometimes, he or she may represent a particular school of thought or practice modality, subject to vociferous objections by those representing alternate points of view. In one of the earliest focus groups I ever conducted, for a textbook publisher during the 1970s, we had attracted a rabbi, an eminent scholar, but had also recruited a dissident who championed a different theoretical position. Despite the adulation of several group members, the rabbi did not have an easy time with the young rebel.

It is advisable to check whether nonconformist viewpoints are present in the group, despite the rabbi’s presence, to invite their expression and to validate their importance.

The rabbi’s lessons

The lesson demonstrated by the rabbi is that, despite our best efforts, we cannot always hermetically seal group discussions from various authority relationships, cultural roles and statuses that are brought into a session from the real world outside the laboratory. Even apparent peers have a natural pecking order, a structure of influence that they will bring to group experiences that moderators are trying to construct. Relations among group members are not always controllable, nor must we persist in struggling to be the ultimate power.

The focus group can be something different - not a controlled discussion in which the information marketers provide is the only critical variable structuring opinions. Instead, the group experience may be a snapshot of an ongoing set of relationships created before the session and persisting well afterwards. What we are witnessing in this context is an actual moment of influence in which ideas are being evaluated, processed, negotiated and compromised.

If a rabbi persistently changes people’s minds in a focus group, it is not necessarily because he or she is exhibiting dominating behavior. Instead, we are viewing a pattern that is likely to occur outside the laboratory. In the real world, marketing communications always are filtered and processed by what Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point refers to as “mavens” - experts, reference groups and peer influencers who serve as the reality check for what people are hearing. People defer to authority figures in real life; opinions are crafted and evolve through an interactive process in which doubts become certainties and information is turned into knowledge. When this process occurs in a focus group, we are viewing in microcosm an actual instance of opinion formation and this should be welcomed, not discouraged.

Leverage the rabbi’s energy

How do we make sure that we are mobilizing the rabbi’s energy for the good of our group and to maximize the client’s learning? Here are some ways for moderators and group leaders to stay ahead of a rabbi:

  • Acknowledgment: It is hard to become a rabbi, so they deserve recognition and respect. Mirroring your group’s admiration helps you maintain rapport with everyone in the room. After two pediatricians referred to the article by that group’s rabbi, I suggested that he spend a few minutes describing its findings to everyone else in the room. This gesture placed the entire group in a situation of equality. Afterwards, I probed whether knowledge about this specialized study would change anyone’s prescribing habits and solicited permission to mention that if anyone wanted to continue the discussion with the rabbi, they could take time at the end of the official discussion.
  • Leverage the rabbi: Turn the rabbi’s presence in the group into an opportunity to extend the client’s insights into opinion formation. When it became obvious that participants in the senior executive study referenced above were deferring to the brand-name CFO, with the agreement of my backroom client, we made his opinions the focus of the discussion. “Jim, you’re the CFO of the largest company represented here and everyone, especially me, would like to hear what you are doing in response to the new law.” We were then able to debrief everyone else in the room about the degree to which their own companies would be likely to make decisions in the same way. This got everybody talking, asking and sharing as peers.
  • Humor: Rabbis do not necessarily want to be the only voice heard in the room; they fall - usually reluctantly - into their old roles with respect to other participants. If your background and level of rapport are appropriate, you can defuse the situation with some gentle joking. As a former university professor myself, I was able to put everyone on an even footing in my optometrists group when I said, “What’s going on here, haven’t we all graduated already? Dr. Johnson, didn’t you ever encourage class participation?” Everyone laughed in recognition and from that point onwards, deferring to the rabbi stopped being a problem.
  • Projective and enabling techniques: Exercises may be used to overcome the problems of different statuses in the room. All participants are on an equal level when they are reacting to unfamiliar stimuli. It is sometimes challenging to implement projective tools with senior professionals and executives, but it is valuable to use them to overcome the politeness barrier.

Achieve goals

Working effectively with participants who stimulate strong feelings within fellow respondents is an issue faced in all kinds of group discussions - not only those involving professionals. In any study, specific individuals may become admired because they are hotter, cooler, better traveled or more informed. Great moderators help to achieve client-focused goals no matter who shows up for the session.