Cognitive Design

Eating too fast and not taking time to feel how full you are (satiated) can lead to overeating. Enter the Mandometer, a computerized scale that monitors weight changes in your plate of food during eating to advise on consumption speed and to send prompts asking you to pause and check for feelings of fullness.

And it appears to work. According to a post on Scientific American:

“In a study published January 5 in the British Medical Journal, participants who received Mandometer assistance for one year lost significantly more body mass index (BMI), which is a measure of weight based on height, than those who did not. In fact, the Mandometer group, but not the control group, achieved the reduction in BMI that the authors had previously determined was necessary to lead to a difference in body composition and metabolism. ”

The device used under clinical supervision is also being applied to retrain those with eating disorders. Watch a demo video here.

The Design with Intent Blog is providing a toolkit including 47 design patterns for achieving behavior change. We have discussed many of the patterns on this blog but having them summarized, categorized (architectural, error proofing, persuasive, visual, cognitive and security) and illustrated in one spot is a real advantage.

Four new experimental studies confirm what many cognitive designers suspected – we are over confident when it comes to predicting our ability to control urges and impulses. Described in the research article, Restraint Bias: How the Illusion of Self-Restraint Promotes Impulsive Behavior, the authors get right to designable-insights:

“This biased perception of restraint had important consequences for people’s self-control strategies. Inflated impulse-control beliefs led people to overexpose themselves to temptation, thereby promoting impulsive behavior.”

 If you don’t have access to the journal, you can get more info in the blog post, Step Away from the Cookie Jar!

Be sure to test for the restraint bias in your next behavior change project.

Controlling (or more broadly regulating) our own behaviors in the face of powerful thoughts, emotions, memories and cravings is one of the central challenges in modern society. It is also one of the reasons for bothering with cognitive design. Designing to enable self-control is a foundational challenge for cognitive designers.

That is why I am always on the lookout for new scientific studies with designable insights into cognition and neurology of self control/regulation.   Just found a new brain scanning study on cocaine users from the Brookhaven National Lab that may settle a long standing issue. The study found that cocaine user’s can control cravings for the drug even after they have been exposed to cues that trigger the craving.  This is an important finding because often it is assumed that once exposed to a cue or trigger our capacity for self control approaches zero. As the researchers state:

“Many current drug treatment programs help addicted individuals predict when and where they might be exposed to drug cues so that they can avoid such situations,” Volkow said. “While this is a very useful strategy, in real-word situations, cues may come up in unexpected ways. Our findings suggest that a clinical strategy that trains cocaine abusers to exert greater cognitive control could help them selectively inhibit the craving response whenever and wherever drug cues are encountered — whether expectedly or unexpectedly.”

So there is scientific evidence to encourage the design of post-cue self control strategies even when faced with something as powerful as the craving for cocaine.

One reason the Weight Watcher’s program is successful at helping people lose weight is that it provides point-based guidelines for daily consumption. The system is more comprehensive than anything else you will find and it helps you avoid making substitutions that accidentally undermine your goal.

 The point system provides a measurable way of staying on track on a daily basis.  Sounds simple but it is a powerful cognitive design technique.  The system once learned provides a “mental budget” or a low cognitive load way of self-regulating.  I can quickly determine if I am on target before I eat the food – a leading indicator, rather than just weighting myself to see if I am track – a lagging indicator. Further, I only have so much mental energy during the day to control my emotional and behavioral reactions and everything is pulling on it. The point system or mental budget uses very little of that mental energy compared to other programs for regulating my weight.

A mental budget by itself is not enough to make new behaviors happen.

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Habits spreading like infectious diseases through social networks appear to be all the rage. Catching your eating, smoking, happiness, mood and hygiene habits from those you hang out with is under the microscope. For a quick overview and some interesting reader comments (that challenge) check out Eva Judson’s post in the New York Times on Social Medicine. Please note that is social (as via social networks) not socialized (as via single payer government system) medicine.

I have read the literature around this topic for some time in the hopes of gaining new scientific insight into how we form (or fail to form) habits.  The key question from a cognitive design standpoint is what is the social cognitive psychology behind behavioral contagions?  The answer unfortunately, is not clear.

 ”But then, how does something like obesity get “caught”? That’s not clear. One idea is that people judge their own weight by that of their friends — you think of yourself as thin if you are thinner than the people you know — and eat accordingly. Another is that friends mirror one another’s eating habits. Many studies have found that people tend to eat less when they are eating with someone who is not eating much. Also, people tend to eat more when they eat with friends rather than with strangers. Perhaps, too, a habit of eating, say, dessert when you are with your friends makes you more likely to eat it when you are alone. ”

Perhaps there is a mystery here because we are not looking at the entire picture.

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I am amazed at how many projects aimed at trying to create and sustain behavior change end up including a website as a least part of their design.  If your behavior change program includes a website you need to check out this article, that focuses on the information architecture of behavior change websites.

The authors look at various information architecture or website designs (matrix, hierarchical, tunnel and hybrid) and explain how they influence certain types of user behaviors. The article does not go on to link the feature-behavior discussion into the psychology of self-regulation but that is what we cognitive designers can do!

“unprecedented insight into how digital games can improve players’ health behaviors and outcomes” 

The San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting article outlining recently funded University research into the affect of video games on health. The questions is can we develop video games that help people change behaviors or self-manage chronic illnesses? The Robert Wood Johnson foundation is giving $1.8M to nine teams to find out.

If this research is productive it should throw off many insights into designing for how minds work.  Consider:

“For example, the research teams will delve into the popular dance pad video game Dance Revolution to see how it might help Parkinson’s patients reduce the risk of falling, or how facial recognition games might be designed to help people with autism better identify others’ emotions.

The studies will focus on diverse population groups that vary by race and ethnicity, health status, income level and game-play setting, with age groups ranging from elementary school children to 80-year-olds. The research teams will study participants’ responses to health games played on a variety of platforms, such as video game consoles, computers, mobile phones and robots.”

Hopefully the results will have implications far beyond the use of video games.

Pro-change behavior systems is a cool company. They have taken the evidence-based guidelines or science we have for the transtheoretical approach to behavior change and translated it into products and services.  For example, they built an algorithmic measure of your change readiness into a traditional health risk assessment.  This should help tune the behavior changes strategies you are most ready to act on.  

To hear more about how they are translating the science of behavior change into action look at the proactive health consumer demo.

There is an interesting post on the PsyBlog on How Long Does it Take to Form a Habit? After exploding some myths (it takes 21 days) and dashing the hope that we can just google an answer (21- 28 days) they review a recent study that shows (not surprisingly) that it varies by the complexity of the new habit you are trying to form.

 Two key findings caught my eye:

1. It takes on average 66 days of practice to form simple new habits such as eating a piece of fruit daily. Something becomes a habit when we no longer need to exert self control to do the behavior (it becomes automatic).

2. There is significant individual and sub-group variation. For example the variation in one experiment was 18 days to 254 days for the same habit.

Both of these finding offer factors to consider any time you are designing a behavior change program, especially one focused on a small steps approach. The first offers a guide line on the amount of repetition that is involved. Turns out missing a day is not too bad but being consistent early on the new habit curve has the most value. The second, highlighting variation, underwrites the importance of developing a psychographic profile or segmenting those you are designing for into new habit champs and new habit resistors.