Cognitive Design

 A new article in psychological science suggests a neural connection between self control and intelligence.

“The results show that participants with the greatest activation in the brain region known as the anterior prefrontal cortex also scored the highest on intelligence tests and exhibited the best self-control during the financial reward test. “

“The authors suggest that greater activity in the anterior prefrontal cortex helps people not only to manage complex problems, resulting in higher intelligence, but also aids in dealing with simultaneous goals, leading to better self-control. ”

So intelligence might be a proxy for estimating a capacity for behavioral self control. This is a useful insight for cognitive designers that need to understand individual differences in users as they fail or succeed with products and programs that require self control during use (e.g. wellness, savings and self-care programs).

Green Bank offers a CARES (Committed Action to Reduce and End Smoking) savings account.  Smokers qualify and they make regular deposits for six months after which time they take a urine test. The test proves if they have smoked or not. Smokers loose their deposits (to a charity of their choice) and those that did not smoke keep the money.

As the recent study, Put Your Money Where Your Butt Is, shows this approach is surprisingly effective even at sustaining the behavior change well after the initial six months.   

There is some good cognitive design going on here.  The over confidence bias and the impulse to bet/gamble will get me into the program. Initial deposits are small so I can easily overcome my aversion to loss. However, towards the end of the six months I have significant account value (approx 20% of a month’s salary) and so loss aversion now works in favor of making the behavior change.  The urine test creates a strong sense of accountability so there is little room for rationalizing or invoking beliefs that self-justify smoking behaviors. Last but not least, participants receive encouragement and feedback when they make deposits.

This is especially clever as it meets two hard behavioral challenges at once – savings and smoking.

When designing a behavior change program or product it is important to know what level of self-regulatory ability your target market has. How good are they at managing their own thoughts, emotions and behaviors when it comes to reaching a goal? In short, how much self-control do they have?  

Self regulatory ability or strength is used when you try to avoid existing behaviors such as over eating, smoking, drinking, spending too much money or when you initiate new behaviors such as saving money, exercising or following a new safety procedure at work. There is a moment of truth when you either pass or fail in avoiding/initiating the old/new behavior.   As designers we want to be sure that our artifacts don’t assume users have more self regulatory strength (self control) than they do.  Such artifacts will lead to self-regulatory failures and agitate users. But how do we know what level of self regulation users are operating on?  

A promising new tool, the Elaboration on Potential Outcomes (EPO) scale was published in the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. First introduced in a Ph.D thesis,  by Gergana Yordanova, the scale uses 13-questions to determine a consumer’s tendency to reflect on and evaluate the potential outcomes of future actions. This in turn is correlated to their ability to self-regulate.   This result may seem like common sense – people who think and care about future consequences will tend to have behavioral self control, but the EPO scale gives us a simple way to measure it in people and populations.  

The questions are asked in three general categories, and quoted directly are: 

“Generation/evaluation dimension: 

1. Before I act I consider what I will gain or lose in the future as a result of my actions

2. I try to anticipate as many consequences of my actions as I can

3. Before I make a decision I consider all possible outcomes

4. I always try to assess how important the potential consequences of my decisions might be  

5. I try hard to predict how likely different consequences are

6. Usually I carefully estimate the risk of various outcomes occurring 

Positive outcome focus dimension: 

7. I keep a positive attitude that things always turn out all right

8. I prefer to think about the good things that can happen rather than the bad

9. When thinking over my decisions I focus more on their positive end results 

Negative outcome focus dimension: 

10. I tend to think a lot about the negative outcomes that might occur as a result of my actions

11. I am often afraid that things might turn out badly

12. When thinking over my decisions I focus more on their negative end results

13. I often worry about what could go wrong as a result of my decisions” 

Yes answers indicate higher EPO and a greater chance that the consumer will have self-regulatory success when faced with a choice. 

The challenge is how can we as cognitive designers put the EPO scale to use to help make more effective change programs and products?

At the very least, it may be possible to factor in the 13-questions to any modeling we do to build a psychographic profile of the target group we are designing for. 

Other blog post on EPO can be found as Look Before you Leap: new study examine self control on Science Daily and intellectual vanities.

Designing artifacts that change people’s behavior “for the better” is very difficult. Changing unwanted health, savings, safety or customer-related behaviors are among the hardest things we must do. Cognitive designers are always on the look out for new tactics and approaches to help clients avoid failure and achieve success with behavior change programs.

Check out Melinda Fulmer’s article in the LA Times on Parent Seeks Ways to Make Kids Eat Vegetables.  The tactic is to grind them up and sneak them into other foods so kids get them without thinking about it.  Kids get what they need and parents don’t need to do battle with them.

There are even books of recipes (The Sneaky Chef) and special lines of food (Bobokids line from Bobobaby) you can buy to take a “sneak attack” approach to behavior change. The approach seems to work and raises some interesting questions for cognitive designers:

- Is this the best approach to take to the problem? The article discusses ways it can backfire.

- Are there other paternalistic (for the user’s own good) applications of the sneak attack technique?

  Designing products, programs and services that make and sustain behavior change is a top priority in the  US today and a central concern in cognitive design.  Making improvements at work, saving enough for retirement, establishing a healthy life style, effective self-care for those with chronic diseases and even moving to “green practices” are all mega issues with personal behavior change at the core.  

 In recognition of its importance, the NIH roadmap for medical research has initiated a new pilot program on the Science of Behavior Change. They recognize that at “40% of all preventable premature deaths are due to specific patterns of behavior” and that “breakthroughs in the science of behavior change could lead to substantial improvements in public health.” 

The goal is to create an integrated science of behavior change (a daunting task) and ”then support exploratory and interdisciplinary research applying new emerging science to the general problems of the initiation, personalization, and maintenance of behavior change.” 

If productive this work will be a treasure trove for the designer interested in creating new health, savings and organizational change programs base on scientific insights into the cognition of self-regulation (self control) and behavior change.  

 Designing to change behavior is the toughest challenge in cognitive design. This is especially true when it comes to designing products, services and communications to change health-related behavior including following the doctor’s advice to manage diabetes and other chronic conditions.

 A new article in the LA Times,  A Health Message Listeners can Relate To,   describes the effectiveness of using soap-opera themed stories to achieve changes in health-related behaviors.

Stories convey important learning without having to work at it (low cognitive load). They are fun to repeat.  Soap operas are the best structure to use for many health applications  because they engage us in social learning or learning by observing (or hearing about) other people’s behavior. We are automatically programmed (or hardwired) to do this. This is why we ask leaders to be an example (model behaviors for employees) and your mom worries about who you hang out with (vicarious learning from your peer group).  Further, soap operas by design “super size” (without lapsing into a parody) human drama giving them hard, deep and potential lasting emotion impact.

Because they have low cognitive load, invoke the powerful force of social learning and have over-sized emotional and psychological content they can be powerful devices for changing behavior.

I recently gave a talk to a group of HR/OD professionals at a Fortune 200 company on what cognitive design can do to enhance organizational effectiveness. One topic that really caught fire was how to redesign (from a cognitive perspective) the HR and management policies in large organizations. As organizations mature policies that are put into place (on how to make decisions and what behaviors are appropriate) can easily evolve into a web of rules, revisions and exceptions that borders on the complexity of the  U.S. tax code.  In such cases the policies create a massive cognitive load on the organization.  Non-compliance, decision errors and unintended consequences can be common place.  On the other hand, a well designed set of policies can make a fundamental contribution to the profitability and competitiveness of the firm.

Cognitive designers can help by emphasizing policies that:

1. Can be applied in a way that fit how managers and employees think (low cognitive load)

2. Safeguard against cognitive biases in managerial decision making

3. Naturally reflect the principles at work in the culture.

Expanding on the first point, policies that fit the way people think typically:

• * Provide examples that contain the answers to the most frequently encountered case – this lets me “blink” or reason by pattern matching.

• * Are resolved by “one good reason” – this lets me make single factor decision the simplest decision heuristic.

• * Invoke sequential reasoning or “rules of thumb” applied in a specific order – this lets me take a cookbook approach and avoid complex branching logic that overloads.

• * Use prioritized and binary branching logic – this lets me work through a complex decision space in otherwise  “fast and frugal” way by answering yes/no questions with the important ones asked first.

These guidelines, based on the last 20 years of research in naturalistic decision-making,  represent increasing degrees of cognitive load including, blinking (no thinking), single rule reaction (little thinking or no thinking), sequential reasoning (little thinking if rules are simple and have a natural order) to more complex decision making.   

The rules-of-the-road for making decisions at a traffic intersection is a good example of a single reason sequential decision making design. You know the story – if a policeman is directing traffic you follow their hand signs. Baring that and given a traffic light you obey that. Absence direction by a policeman, traffic light (or sign) the first person to the intersection has the right-of-way and so on.   All the rules are based on a single factor and are executed in sequence. It would be easy to overcomplicate the situation and design policies for age of the driver, size or type of vehicle, time of day and an endless series of other important sounding variables.  The result would be a lot more accidents and delays.

The rules-of-the-road example also illustrates how policies can reflect principles at work – in this case by respecting authority and being courteous. Linking policy to values (aka principles) in a natural way increases alignment and lowers cognitive load even further.

These cognitive design guidelines can be applied to the development of any type of policies or rules meant to shape behavior and decision-making. They don’t tell you what the policy should say but instead emphasize how it should be said (structured) to make sure they fit with the way our minds work. A body of policies or rules is an artifact that should be designed to support and enhance cognition.

Yes you can through cleverly designed artifacts called commitment devices.  A commitment device is anything you design to avoid anticipated lapses in self control. Using automatic withdrawals to pay yourself first, surrendering your keys to the bartender to avoid driving after drinking or promising (and being held accountable) to donate money to a worthy cause if you start smoking or overeating are all examples of “devices” designed to insure we follow through with our behavior change commitments.   

The key is to design it so there is no way (or at least no easy way) out and the emotion of the anticipated punishment is greater than the temptation to lapse.  A good way to make sure there is no way out is to relinquish control to others — or in short, outsource it.  

But outsource to whom?   Often we ask friends and family for help keep us on track but this can strain relationships. In extreme cases we can seek professional help (checking yourself into rehab is a commitment device so too is Bariatric surgery). Now there is a new alternative. Check out the website StickK. 

“stickK is a web-based company that helps you achieve your personal goals through “Commitment Contracts.” You create a contract obliging you to achieve a specific goal within a specific time-frame. By doing so, you put your reputation at stake. You may also choose to wager money to give yourself added incentive to succeed. If you do succeed, you get your money back. If you fail, the money is forfeited to charity, or to one of several causes, or to a person of your choosing. stickK’s services are absolutely free.”  

Interestingly, you can also put money at risk to go to an organization that you strongly oppose to avoid the trap of giving up because the money is going to help someone. If StickK works it will give cognitive designers a flexible new tool for building commitment devices into behavior change programs. After all, anticipating and engineering away potential fault states is good design.

 There was an excellent article yesterday by Shari Roan, a staff writer for the LA Times, Cue the Gluttony, on the role of environmental triggers in Americans’ overeating. 

Part of the argument is that we are hardwired to overeat so when we are in an environment that offers easy access to giant portions, a constant flow of snacks and drinks and specially designed flavors, smells, packaging and displays that say “eat” most of us will get fat.  Cognitive design has played no small role in getting us into this problem. Consumer research pulls on the latest findings in cognitive science to influence our behaviors and choices. It has been especially effective with food.   

Most of the experts quoted in her article call for changing the environment to help elevate the problem, after all as one expert said, “it is easier to change the environment than it is to change people.”  In this way we might be able to design our way out of obesity with the right regulations (e.g. portion size restrictions), package designs (e.g. 100 calorie packs) and environmental designs (e.g. no fast food outlets in High Schools).  

These ideas will in fact lower the mental work I have to do to influence and ultimately control my eating behaviors. Lowering cognitive load is good cognitive design. The concern is that it limits public choice and business freedoms (which we often do for the public good). It also does not really get at the core of the problem. 

The core problem is that many in the US are unable to influence their own behaviors (self-regulate) sufficiently to maintain health, happiness and financial security.  Not just eating but exercise, drinking/drugs, following treatment plans and other health-related behaviors are clearly outside of individual control. Indeed this is a driver the bulk of the cost problem in healthcare. Further, I over spend for a lot of the same reasons I over eat and therefore threaten my financial health.    When you stack all these up the strategy to re-engineer our environment to compensate for failures to self regulate becomes something we want to approach very cautiously. 

A complementing strategy is to use design to support and enhance the ability of consumers to self-regulate (influence their own behaviors) despite the well-engineered temptations that are everywhere in the environment.  I am not talking about designing healthly choice alternatives (although that is essential) but more about using a deep understanding of cognitive science to develop programs that build our self-regulatory strength.  We need to restore our capacity to act as captains of our own ships – that is how we design our way out of obesity and other lifestyle problems. 

The question is what is known about the cognition of self regulation and how can we use it to better influence our choices and behaviors in tough situations?