Cognitive Design

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.

When changing behaviors the onset of a craving can defeat the best intentions, strongest will and well-funded health program. Cravings are specific and powerful. They have more visceral force than emotions or drive states such as hunger.  In doing cognitive design for behavior change I always ask – are cravings a factor?

According to research just published in the journal, Current Directions in Psychological Sciences, and reported on here, mental imagery plays a key role in the cognition of forming and defeating food cravings.

“Results of one study showed that the strength of participants’ cravings was linked to how vividly they imagined the food. Mental imagery (imagining food or anything else) takes up cognitive resources, or brain power. Studies have shown that when subjects are imagining something, they have a hard time completing various cognitive tasks. In one experiment, volunteers who were craving chocolate recalled fewer words and took longer to solve math problems than volunteers who were not craving chocolate. These links between food cravings and mental imagery, along with the findings that mental imagery takes up cognitive resources, may help to explain why food cravings can be so disruptive: As we are imagining a specific food, much of our brain power is focused on that food, and we have a hard time with other tasks.”

Additional research illustrates how imagery can be used to defeat a food craving:

“The results of one experiment revealed that volunteers who had been craving a food reported reduced food cravings after they formed images of common sights (for example, they were asked to imagine the appearance of a rainbow) or smells (they were asked to imagine the smell of eucalyptus).” 

This is good news for the cognitive designer looking for specific tools for managing the effects of cravings. It also suggest a more fundamental insight – indulging in mental images burns significant cognitive resources.

In a later post I will explore the role of supernormal stimuli in creating cravings.

We gamble because we experience the hope of winning, in some cases such as a lottery ticket, winning more than we could ever otherwise hope to obtain. The payback for gambling is hope and dopamine.  

A recent study in the Journal of Neuroscience, Gambling Severity Predicts Midbrain Response to Near-Miss Outcomes, provides additional detail. The study found that a near-miss (or the perception of almost winning) produces the similar neurological reward as a win with the effect being most intense in problem gamblers. Check out this article on the Telegraph for an overview of the study.

The continued hope of winning is what keeps us gambling because the mental energy (excitement, adrenaline and dopamine) is nearly equivalent to what we get for a win.

Designing artifacts that help us sustain positive behavior change is a grand challenge problem for cognitive design.  Often what is required is a wrap-around or makeover of a new technology or intervention that is failing to produce the behavior change that was expected.  Take for example, electronic health records. Just implementing the technology does not lead to the changes in clinical and patient behavior needed to improved safety, better health outcomes and more efficient operations.

For a more global example, consider the new technologies for personal energy management. I will save energy and help the environment (lower carbon emissions) if I know more about how much energy I am using, which appliances are using it efficiently or not and how my consumption compares to others in my neighborhood and various social networks.

The New Scientist has an excellent article, Innovation: Only Mind Games will make us save power, that discusses these new technologies and the psychology that surrounds them.  The author describes both wrap-around and makeover designs that are emerging and offers some insights into the mind of consumers when it comes to saving energy. The insights include:

-  Economic savings are too small to motivate behavior change

-  Peer pressure is a relevant motivator. “We turn off the lights because we think others do”.

- Information about about energy use can help shift behaviors especially if it is personalized. One study indicated behavior change went from 5% to 80% when personalized information is used.

- Peer pressure and personalized information are not enough, producing only a 2-3% energy reduction when at least 10 times that is required.

- It may be necessary to use smart meters that monitor the environment and automatically adjust consumption and communicate with energy suppliers. See for example, the Adaptive Occupancy Control Technology.

The article cautions that these findings are based on a few preliminary studies and more research is required.   Hopefully, some of that research will have a stronger cognitive design bent. More specifically, we need to  explore how to apply related design patterns (e.g. successful behavior change efforts to make driving safer) and define better ways of creating mental energy (meaning, emotion, pleasure, etc.) to trade for behaviors that save energy in the home and lower carbon emissions.

Getting folks with diabetes to regularly monitor their blood glucose level is a major design challenge, especially for children. Why not make it fun and exciting to do? That is what DIDGET a relatively new blood glucose monitoring device promises to do.

The monitor docks with a Nintendo DS gaming system and converts glucose monitoring results into points. With the points you unlock new levels and buy items in the game. You are rewarded just for monitoring and even more for keep your glucose in the right range. In principle, this is a cognitive design master stroke!

Check out Kelly McGonigal’s blog, Science of Willpower: Secretes for Self-Control without the Suffering. She is a mind-body psychologist and health educator at Standford. She teaches Psychology 205, a very popular course on the science of willpower.

Her blog is filled with posts that should be of interest to cognitive designers working on problems in self-regulation and behavior change. Take for example the post, New Research Roundup on Contributing Factors in Obesity. She looks at three factors including:

This article by Olivia Judson details several recent studies showing how the body shuts down when you sit down. Sit at a desk all day, or watch three hours of TV at night, and it doesn’t even matter if you squeeze in an hour of exercise. A full hour! Every day! It’s not enough to counter the metabolic disaster of being sedentary the rest of the day. That’s right, even people trying to do the right thing have the deck stacked against them.

This has clear and novel implications for anyone designing obesity management programs.

We like to keep things the same, even if it means making errors or receiving less benefit from a situation.  This effect is called the status quo bias. For example, employees will accept the default asset allocation selection in a retirement plan while at the same time understanding that this will likely not produce the best return for them.  The amount of mental energy it takes to think through and select an alternative is not worth the potential future financial benefit.  Plus there is the potential negative emotional energy associated with taking responsibility for the choice and the worry and even anxiety that may produce.  This is not irrationality but it does illustrate the unique cognitive calculus of the status quo bias.  We are very sensitive to (put a huge premium on) the amount of mental energy things take. We don’t want our heads to blow up!

In theory, the harder a decision the more mental energy it requires and therefore the stronger the status quo bias should be.  A recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides evidence for that and even identifies the region of the brain that is active when we overcome the bias. This could prove an important result for those investing in a neuromarketing approach to complex products and services.

A growing number of studies reveal an important new class of self-regulation failure called vicarious goal fulfillment. Interestingly, those that rate high in measures of self-control are especially susceptible.  Most importantly for cognitive designers,  this effect can be triggered when we are trying to design solutions for helping people improve self control!

A recent blog post on Futurity, describes the effect as it relates to food choices:

“It’s an effect called “vicarious goal fulfillment,” in which a person can feel a goal has been met if they have taken some small action, like considering the salad without ordering it, says Gavan Fitzsimons, professor of marketing and psychology at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, who led the research.”

This means offering a health food choice on a menu as a way to improve eating habits can actually backfire and may do so more often for people with high self control. Here is the explanation:

“In this case, the presence of a salad on the menu has a liberating effect on people who value healthy choices,” Fitzsimons says. “We find that simply seeing, and perhaps briefly considering, the healthy option fulfills their need to make healthy choices, freeing the person to give in to temptation and make an unhealthy choice. In fact, when this happens people become so detached from their health-related goals, they go to extremes and choose the least healthy item on the menu.”

This is a great example of why it is critical to understand the actual cognitive needs of the people we are designing for.