Saatchi & Saatchi Conducts Hybrid Experiment

London agency Saatchi & Saatchi has taken to the streets of Rome, one of Europe's busiest cities, to investigate whether the Toyota Hybrid could revive local motorists' love and enthusiasm for the road.

To conduct the ecperiment the agency teamed up with Jonathan Freeman, professor of psychology at Goldsmiths University and managing director of i2 media research, to determine whether a car could tone down the city's road rage. Below is a Q&A with Freeman about the experiment, what he wants to gain from its results and how the outcome will be measured.

What is the purpose of this experiment?

The purpose of the experiment is to independently test whether Toyota Hybrid cars really do make people happier.

What do you want to achieve from the experiment?

Lots of initial research has indicated that people do have a really positive, happy experience when they’re driving a Hybrid cars in highly trafficked areas and we’re doing a controlled experiment here - an independent experiment - to test whether that’s actually true. We’re not just asking people what they feel, we’re actually measuring their facial expressions, the characteristics of their voice so we can understand from what they leak about their feelings just how happy they really are.

Previous research for Toyota has shown that people talk about driving a Hybrid as a very positive experience, that it’s less stressful - associated with more happier driving experiences even in heavily trafficked areas.

Why did you choose Rome to conduct this experiment?

Rome is a great choice as a location for this independent experiment because it is one of the busiest, most traffic-affected cities in the world.

What have the participants of the Hybrid experiment been asked to do?

Participants in the experiment have been asked to drive the routes they normally drive on a day-to-day basis around Rome in their own cars and Hybrid cars.

Each time they drive, we ask them to fill in a questionnaire about their experience and we’re also measuring how happy or stressed they are using our implicit measures, so analysing their facial expression and the non-verbal aspects of what they don’t’ say from their voice such as the speed of their conversation, the pitch of it and how stressed they sound.

We’re particularly interested in understanding how happy people are when they are driving and how that happiness varies

 How are you measuring the stress levels of the participants?

We’re using three different types of measures in this experiment. The first is qualitative, literally asking people how happy or stressed they are whilst driving around heavily trafficked streets in Rome. The second we call ‘quantitative and its affectively using questionnaires and we measure how people’s mood changes from before to after they have a drive through heavily trafficked streets. The third is what I think is the most interesting, we’re looking at people’s facial expressions and aspects of their non-verbal, vocal characteristics, so how stressed they sound to really work out how happy, sad or stressed they are when they’re driving through traffic here in Rome.

What did the participants think of Hybrid cars before they took part in the experiment?

The first part of the study involved interviewing all of our participants to understand what they thought about Hybrid cars relative to diesel. It’s fair to say that most were pretty unfamiliar with the concept of Hybrid and just didn’t’ really know what to expect.