Cognitive Design

When we are trying to change behaviors (smoking, spending, eating, etc.) it is natural to think about doing the very things we are trying to change. This has led some to advocate thought suppression as behavior change strategy. If you want to stop smoking for example, every time you find yourself thinking about smoking, stop and think about something else.  The idea is that if you are not thinking about it you are less likely to do it.

This is a common sense strategy but it will backfire.  

There is plenty of evidence that suggests suppressed thoughts reassert themselves with a vengeance.  If I try and avoid thinking about smoking I just end up thinking about it more!  But worse, recent scientific studies show there is also a behavioral rebound.  For example, the Research Digest Blog reports in Stubbing out thoughts of smoking leads smokers to end up smoking more:

 ”The main finding was that smokers in the suppression group smoked less than others during the middle week while they were suppressing smoking-related thoughts, but ended up smoking significantly more than the other smokers in the final week. In other words, trying to avoid thinking about smoking had a short term benefit but ultimately led to more smoking later on.” 

The same researchers also reported suppressing thoughts about chocolate leads to eating more of it.   The fact that it produces a short term win but fails in the longer term is especially important. This has clear implications for cognitive designer working on behavior change programs.

Imagine surfing online and running into a banner that reads “click now to contribute $1 to your nest egg. It will more that triple by your retirement age!”.  A buck and a click now for three bucks when I am old, sounds a bit boring. Would I do it?  I asked that to a group of 20 middle-age surfers (45 - 55) and 85% said yes.  They also wanted a widget to track contributions, projected returns and performance relative to others (friends) that are using from this surf-and-save offering.

Once you used surf-and-save for a while the pull to save impulsively will magnify.  For example, the widget would use historical data (online behavior) and your profile to illustrate the financial impact of saving a $1.5 instead of $1.  This could be big money if you spend considerable time online and don’t plan to retire soon. Plus it would likely let you zoom ahead of your friends!

A prototype of surf-and-save does not require a major investment. It would be interesting to find the online contexts and widget behaviors that produced the greatest conversion rates for saving impulsively.

Why can’t  savings be like experience points in social games? Millions of people spend hours a week in online virtual worlds (e.g. World of Warcraft) earning experience points so they can upgrade their avatar, buy virtual goods or enter a new region of the game. Why not use the same mechanism to save real dollars for retirement?

We are already spending a billion real dollars for virtual goods and sponsors are giving virtual dollars to online citizens willing to do simple tasks such as watching videos and completing quizzes. The virtual and real economies are colliding.   Being online means the cost of doing simple financial transactions approaches zero. This means saving a little impulsive many times can be done cost effectively.

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In the July 27th issue of Circulation, the American Heart Association made a 37 page scientific statement on interventions that produce enough activity and dietary changes in adults to lower their cardiovascular risk. One in three people in the US have cardiovascular disease and it is still our leading cause of death.

They looked at the results of 74 individual studies and essentially found that it requires a combination of cognitive strategies to produce lasting health-related behavior change including, counseling, goal setting, extended follow-up and self monitoring. Personalized strategies that use data and context relevant to the individual patient work best.

None of this will be a surprise to cognitive designers but it is good to have the force of a meta-study behind your approach. Plus they looked at the evidence for using specific techniques (e.g. motivational interviewing) and specific platforms (e.g. web. I am still working through the details on specific interventions and will share designable insights in later posts.

The electric power generation and distribution system in the US is sometimes called the grid.  A major makeover is in the works that includes an overlay of computers, monitoring devices and software that will make it smarter. This so-called Smart Grid is supported by the Department of Energy (DOE) and is being developed by corporate giants such as IBM and GE. It will change everything about how we use electrical energy for the better - faster, cheaper, cleaner and more reliable.

Designers are even getting into the game. Check out Frog Design is Making the Smart Grid Sexy:

 ”Smart energy products are still in their infancy. While plenty of tools exist to help homeowners track their power use, the majority of them don’t actively help consumers  do anything about their excessive energy use. “We are in the era of awareness tech,” explains David Merkoski, Executive Creative Director at frog design. “The next era is products and services that move into behavior design.”

This is a major opportunity for cognitive designers interested in behavior change.  And it is not just in the home but also business and other organizations that are looking to save money and the planet by making a smart grid investment.

Cognitive design has a key role to play because the hardware/software infrastructure or “information management overlay” needed for the Smart Grid will evolve in stages. We are a long-way off from full automation and therefore human habit and behavior change will continue to play a staring role in creating value.  These behavior changes include for example  shutting off lights, unplugging appliances with vampire load,  putting your computer in sleep mode and adjusting temperature when you are gone or sleeping. All things we don’t have much of a personal financial incentive to do. Perhaps we can find new ways to motivate such behaviors using the “awareness tech” (mentioned above). But who is working on those designs?

A supernormal stimulus is any stimulus that has evolved or has been engineered to elicit a stronger than normal reaction.  A puzzle or mystery that you compulsively need to solve. A game you cannot stop playing (literally). A toy so cute you just must cuddle, nurture and protect it. A food or drink so tasty that you cannot “eat just one” but will literally eat or drink it until it is gone.  A photo so sexy that….

These stimuli are created by exaggerating the features of normal stimuli that we are hard wired to respond to.  For example, oversize, and super sad eyes to elicit the instinctual response to nurture.  Or foods engineered with unnaturally high levels of fat, sugar or salt will stimulate us to eat compulsively. Why else would triple patty hamburgers with cheese and bacon sell in the millions?

This gives us one formula for creating irresistible artifacts. Understand which features and functions are wired to instinctual responses and super size them.

You can super-size by literally making them bigger or by increasing the frequency of the effect.

Artifacts with supernormal stimuli tend to be irresistible and require considerable self control on the part of the consumer. Indeed, two recent books,  Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose and Waistland: The R/evolutionary science behind our weight and fitness crisis, argue that such artifacts are so irresistible that supernormal stimuli may be a root cause of our health, spending and anger related problems in the US.

Both books are a must read for cognitive designers interested in behavior change.   They catalog examples of supernormal stimuli in both nature and human society and give some insights into the features that are so effective at driving deep instinctual reactions.  

Let’s try to harness supernormal stimuli to makes use healthier, happier, smarter and more financially secure.

In developed countries the top survival skill in the early 21st century looks to be the ability to self-regulate or control your own behaviors, appetites and emotions. The simple form of this argument points to otherwise avoidable health risks being the number one cause of death. Lifestyle choices (eating, exercise, drugs, stress, etc.) leading to chronic conditions and eventual death.  

In a recent New York Times article Dysregulation Nation, Judith Warner, chronicles the details:

“Now there is a case to be made that problems of self-regulation — of appetite, emotion, impulse and cupidity — may well be the defining social pathology of our time.”

“Eating disorders, “in general a disorder of self-regulation,” according to Darlene M. Atkins, director of the Eating Disorders Clinic at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, grew epidemic in the past few decades, and in recent years have spread to minority communities, younger girls, older women and boys and men too.”

“We read about dopamine fiends sitting enslaved to their screens, their brains hooked on the bursts of pleasure they receive from the ding of each new e-mail message or the arousing flash of a tweet. “

“Mental-health professionals report seeing increasing numbers of kids who are all out of sync: they can’t sustain attention, regulate their rage, moderate their pain, tolerate normal types of sensory input.”

“The signs that something is amiss in our inner mechanisms of control and restraint are everywhere. “

As dark as this seems I firmly believe we can design our way out of it. (more…)

The Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago includes a Center for Decision Research. The work they do is cutting edge and full of designable insights.  To see what I mean browse the papers in the Behavioral Science Workshop Section.

For example, there are many insightful articles on behavior and habit change.  Consider the general conclusion of Can’t Control Yourself:

“Are people stuck hopelessly repeating their bad habits? Our answer, from research on what people do in their everyday lives when trying to change their responses, is not necessarily. Participants in our studies were reasonably successful at exerting control over unwanted responses when they used self-control strategies that are tailored to the specific cuing mechanisms that produced the response (i.e., temptations vs. habits). Thus, as suggested in earlier research on delay of gratification, having sufficient control strength is not a guarantee of successful control. The participants in our diary and laboratory studies were most successful when they exerted control in ways best suited to inhibiting the habit mechanism that activated the unwanted response.”

The implications for cognitive designers are clear - emphasize avoidance strategies (staying away from the stimulus that triggers the unwanted behavior) over motivation and self-regulatory strength.

The Scientific American has an excellent article on Alcoholics Anonymous as it celebrates its 75th year. The article highlights success stats. Not surprising the ability to stay sober correlates to the number of meetings you attend and how long you stay with the program. To quote:

 ”Of those who dropped out of A.A. after the first year, only 43 percent were still sober at year five. Of those who went to 60 meetings a year 73 percent continued to abstain. And 79 percent of those who attended 200 meetings annually had gone into remission by year five. Maybe most surprising, is that 61% of those who attended 200 meetings in their first year but dropped down to six meetings in year five, were still able to stay dry.”

 Staying sober is a powerful behavior change. AA’s 12 guiding principles warrant serious study by cognitive designers working in any area of behavior change.

Our brain consumes 20-30% of our total energy (25% of glucose, 20% oxygen). It burns energy 10 times faster per unit of tissue than any other part of the body. Energy plays a big role in brain function and cognitive performance.   The makeup of this energy is complex. There is brain glucose, a number of neurotransmitters, adrenaline and more psychological components such as feeling of mental fatigue and the ability to do cognitive work.  As designers we need to be concerned with how the features and functions of an artifact impact all aspects of mental energy.  So I am always on the lookout for new scientific studies that provide insight into how to leverage mental energy with design.

A good example is recent work at the University of Pennsylvania, nicely summarized by EurekaAlert!, that provides some evidence against the glucose depletion theory of self-control. To quote:

“Kurzban’s new analysis is consistent with the neuroscience literature, which strongly implies that the marginal difference in glucose consumption by the brain from five minutes of performing a “self-control” task is unlikely in the extreme to be of any significant size. Further, research on exercise shows that burning calories through physical activity, which really does consume substantial amounts of glucose, in fact shows the reverse pattern from what the model would predict: People who have recently exercised and burned glucose are better, not worse, on the sorts of tasks used in the self-control literature.”

This means that designs aimed at boosting blood sugar levels to improve self-control may not work.   It also suggest that using activity or exercise may work (likely due to the production of mental energy via neurotransmitters or increased in self-efficacy and other psychological effects).  

In general this implies that cognitive designs need to go beyond the biological effects of sugar to emphasize the production of natural brain drugs (neurotransmitters) and mental states that correlated to the psychological ability to do mental work (e.g. meaning).

The Science of Willpower Blog has an interesting post on behavior change. They review research that reveals:

Slapping a tax on unhealthy foods improves eating habits more effectively than making healthy foods cheaper. 

Making food cheaper just means we buy more of the good stuff, we don’t stop buying the bad stuff. What the study found was:

“Give someone a fresh vegetable, and they’ll add it into their existing diet. But it’s not going to replace the french fries. And we’ve seen in other cases — taxing cigarettes, rising gasoline prices — that higher prices really can change habits.”

The questions is why does increasing prices work better? One insight offered in the post is - taxes tend to make us mad and that might interfere with the craving or compulsion that drives the bad habit.  It could be more about the negative mental energy that is generated than the economic logic.