Cognitive Design

Some argue that we are awash in unethical behavior at all levels in society.  For example, check out David Callahan’s, The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead.  Attempts to curb unethical behavior don’t appear to be doing the job.  Much like our attempts to change unhealthy behaviors, we spend a lot of money and do a lot of education but are still losing ground.

Unethical behaviors are driven by the choices we make and the habits we have.   To effect real change we need to understand the moral reasoning behind ethical choices and the cognitive science of how moral habits are formed. That’s why I am always on the look out for scientific studies of moral reasoning that offer actionable insights for designers. One of my favorite resources is the Morality Lab at Boston University where they study the cognitive neuroscience of moral reasoning.

Take for example, the recent finding  that priming can be used to shift your view on ethics and change behavior:

“Getting people to think about morality as a matter of objective facts rather than subjective preferences may lead to improved moral behavior.”

Here is the question they used to prime for moral realism: “Do you agree that some things are just morally right or wrong, good or bad, wherever you happen to be from in the world?” Nothing more complicated than that.

The design implications of this are clear. Communications, leadership talk and other messaging that promotes moral realism (ethics are a matter of fact) might  boost the effectiveness of your ethics effort.   You can access a draft of the entire paper HERE and be sure to check out the lab’s other publications.

I am interested to hear from other cognitive designers that are working on ethics challenges.

About 25% of the queries I get for consulting work in cognitive design have to do with ethics.   Employers large and small are worried about the lack of ethical behavior in the workplace.   Ethics is an interesting area to work in because it pulls on everything from moral philosophy to cognitive science and behavior change. Business ethics has been the biggest boom of all time for the applied philosopher.

How to design and implement a successful workplace ethics program is an open issue.  So I am always on the look out for new scientific research into moral cognition, ethical behaviors and value-based decision making.  Found an interesting post on Futurity about research done at UC Berkley on the connection between your attitudes about greed and your propensity to cheat, lie and otherwise engage in unethical behavior. Specifically they:

“… consistently found that upper-class participants were more likely to lie and cheat when gambling or negotiating, cut people off when driving, and endorse unethical behavior in the workplace.”

However, upon further investigation they found it was not socio-economic status that was the primary driver of unethical behavior but participants’ attitudes and beliefs about greed.   Participants that were primed to see the benefits of greed tended to act more unethically.

While this might not be too surprising, having scientific evidence for any predictive factor of unethical behaviors is critical to designing effective workplace ethics programs.

There has been a serious uptick in using cognitive psychology and neuroscience to improve  teaching and learning. The new field of educational neuroscience is burgeoning and has implications for practice.  For a good overview check out the latest edition of Mind, Brain and Education: Implications for Educators.  It is free online.

Be sure to read David Sousa’s commentary on the Impact of Educational Neuroscience on the Science of Teaching. It begins on page 37. He summarizes 13 key findings and their implications for how we educate. Cognitive designers will especially appreciate the findings on emotions, movement, working memory and the role of arts in stimulating learning and developing our brains.

After reading all the articles, it is clear that we have enough new science to reshape the practice of teaching and learning.

I am interested to hear from readers that are applying findings from neuroscience to change how they teach or otherwise facilitate learning.

Source of Image:  John Hopkins School of Education

A strategy in cognitive design is to find artifacts that produce potent think-and-feel experiences and reverse engineer them. The idea is to find the pattern of reusable features and functions that makes them work and apply it to other innovation challenges. For example, gamification or applying game dynamics to non-game design challenges is all the rage.

Another big opportunity is art. Can we artify just as we gamify?  The essence of the aesthetic experience has resisted explanation for hundred of years but we are making progress.  For example, a new paper in the journal of cognitive psychology presents bottom-up factors (abstraction, form, complexity and symmetry) and top-down factors (novelty and viewer expertise) that can be used to predict art appreciation.

These factors are a far cry from a design pattern but they will surely strongly inform our guesses.  As the authors point out:

Though the notion that one could ever “fully” explain or predict an aesthetic preference may appear implausibly reductionist, this review demonstrates that scientific methods have shed significant light on a variety of factors that reliably influence art appreciation, paving the way to a greater understanding of the psychology underlying visual art.

I am interested to hear from readers that have attempted replicate artistic effects in their designs or innovations. What pattern did you use? How did you arrive at it?

Cognitive design is the preferred innovation method when psychological impact plays a central role in value creation. This is clearly the case in entertainment, advertising and adventure travel and we wish it where the case in leadership, healthcare and education.  But consider the case, as they do in the article Bottling Customer Experience, where competing products are all functionally similar. In such a case the only way to differentiate is through psychological impact.  While there are many ways to have such an impact it usually entails authentically touching the heart and accelerating the mind by carefully crafting attributes to produce specific cognitive (intellectual), emotional, motivational and volitional states.   The article discussed how Method Products added emotional attributes to common household cleaning products to rapidly gain $200M in market share.  While a great case to study they make a broader point:

“Most companies underestimate the power of emotional differentiation, focusing instead on functional differentiation. Rational, fact-based, “hard” attributes always play well in boardrooms and focus groups, but they don’t reflect the real way consumers think and act. Consumer loyalty is the result of a brand’s ability to stand out on both functional and emotional attributes. Sure, most consumers consider functional attributes more important than emotional ones, but what if all your competitors have the same functional attributes? “

The article stresses that emotions are rooted in sensory experience.  Features that shape what we see, smell, hear, taste and touch by how they trigger our values, mental models, metaphors and cognitive biases hold the key to creating emotional differentiation. That is what cognitive design is all about.

Embodied cognition is an active field of research that explores the role of our body in thinking, learning, creativity and all manner of cognitive activity.   These results are especially relevant to cognitive designers because our bodies are a natural interface to the artifacts we create.

Take for example, recent research at Notre Dame that suggests we can think better under certain circumstances if we are able to hold an object near our hands.   Subjects were asked to analyze a set of complex geometric shapes. One group held their hands by the images another group put their hands in their lap. Those with their hands by the images performed better.  The researcher offer this insight:

“Near the body, and especially near the hands, attention to detail is crucial because subtle differences among objects can differentiate the harmful from the benign….”

Studying visual representations plays an important role in math, science, the arts and many other human endeavors. When high visual acuity is critical it might be smart to use our hands – literally.

Deadline for submission is August 3, 2011 by 5pm EDT 

STEM or science, technology, engineering and mathematics is a big driver of innovation and economic progress in the US. Providing high-quality public education in STEM is therefore vital to growing the US economy.  Our global rankings in STEM education have been slipping and elective enrollment in STEM areas has been falling.  The old model of STEM fails to meet the psychological needs and demands of 21st century students in the US.

Teaching and learning STEM involves all dimensions of our minds – intellectual, emotional, motivational and volitional and therefore retooling it is a major cognitive design challenge.   Making real progress in public STEM education requires designing new learning processes optimized for how the minds of US students really work.

One approach to improve STEM education is to more deeply involve professionals, companies and other community resources with STEM expertise in the learning process. To help bring focus to this approach, Changemakers working with the Carnegie Corporation and The Opportunity Equation has launched a STEM competition around the theme:

“Partnering for Excellence: Innovations in Science + Technology + Engineering + Math Education, an online collaborative competition, will spur creative ways for companies, universities, and other organizations with expertise in the STEM fields to partner with the public schools that need their talent. We are looking for models that bring STEM expertise into public schools, thereby using resources from the private and not-for-profit sectors in new ways to further student learning designed with a “long term, part time” approach (see visual below)”

As of this post there are a 101 entries. The deadline for submission is 5pm ET on August 3rd.  While there are several cash prizes to win, the real value might be in the community-based feedback you received on your proposal.

In an earlier post, we explored PatientsLikeMe, a unique site for crowdsourcing patient data in great quantitative detail.  The idea is that patients share tons of personal health data by tracking symptoms, lab results, interventions and the outcomes produced in quantitative form. This creates a river of data for helping each other and is invaluable for researchers, insurers, drug companies and medical device companies looking to develop better health solutions.   An exciting and potential disruptive way to crowdsource health innovations.

But will an open source approach to clinical research catch on, especially will all the concerns about privacy?  It looks like it is. Check out CureTogether. They have 13,000 members in 112 countries contributing 1.2 million data points on 600 conditions.  All the data is supplied by patients. They are actively leveraging that it in 6 university-based studies. It is interesting to note that the most active area is anxiety with some 2000 members.

Patient sourcing (patients working on cures through a crowdsourcing model), especially when it is quantitative can change the time, cost and quality of clinical research by a factor of 10. As they point out on the website capturing quantitative is the key:

“CureTogether is about quantifying the collective patient experience. While most other patient support sites have focused on stories or information from experts, we focus on quantitative data across over 600 patient-contributed conditions. Individual data is kept private, but the anonymized aggregate data is shared openly to maximize discoveries that can be made.”

Obviously this involves considerable work for patients.  But the return on effort is outstanding.  Members get unique advice, daily encouragement and the opportunity to contribute to something of major importance. Powerful cognitive design.

Just organizations treat employees fairly. Generating feelings and thoughts of fairness in employees requires making decisions and taking actions that produce favorable outcomes and/or use processes that involve employees, create a level playing field and provide clear explanations of why.   To maintain a sense of fairness when everyone cannot receive a favorable outcome means using processes that are inclusive, consistent and clear.  Up to a point, high process fairness is very important for maintaining organizational justice at crunch time or when outcomes are very unfavorable – layoffs, budget cuts and work-life imbalances.

Crunch time in organizational justice presents many cognitive design challenges.   Such situations carry a strong emotional charge (guilt, sympathy, fear) and can have subtle cognitive side effects.  For example, you can accidentally and negatively impact employee self esteem or create survival guilt with high process fairness.

Further, bad news carries tremendous cognitive load. One that authorities delivering the news might not be able to handle well enough to maintain high process fairness.  There are several other cognitive factors inhibiting manager from following high process fairness including lack of belief that they will do much good and a natural reluctance to surrender power. These issues are covered well in the new book Contemporary Look at Organizational Justice: Multiply Insult Times Injury. It is a bit academic but the free chapter is on practical applications.

When outcomes are bad our brains go into overdrive on many levels. Not attending to the cognitive factors at crunch time strongly diminishes our ability to treat employees fairly and maintain a sense of organizational justice. This is especially the case if we design high-fairness processes that fail to account for how the mind of the managers naturally works. They won’t get implemented.  

The case for this is made fairly strongly in the book. Indeed, the author calls it the Paradox of Process Fairness.  It is a paradox because the business case for process fairness during crunch time is good yet the evidence suggests we don’t use it. We don’t use it because we have failed to design high fairness processes that meet the cognitive needs of managers. We create the conditions of fairness for employees – involvement, level playing field, clarity of explanation but leave managers with a sometime unbearable cognitive load, no response to their belief that it does not work, naive demand to share power and the like.

The challenge for cognitive designers working in the field of organizational justice is to create high process fairness that meets the psychological needs of both employees and managers.