Cognitive Design

Over the last 30 years we have learned a lot about how minds really work. One of the major findings is that how we use our physical body during a mental process can strongly determine the outcome.  Cognition is not just in our minds it is literally embedded in the rest of our bodies.  We say cognition is embodied for short. Walking to think things through,  tossing the football between study sessions and explaining things with our hands are all commonly practiced acts of embodied cognition.

So I am always on the lookout for new scientific studies on embodied cognition that hold insights for designers.  Take for example the article in the Journal of Consumer Research, From Firm Muscles to Firm Willpower: Understanding the Role of Embodied Cognition in Self-Regulation. The authors report on a series of five experiments that demonstrate, for the first time as far as I know, that self control is embodied. Specifically they found:

“Across our studies, we triangulated on our premise that muscle firming facilitates self-control by firming willpower in several ways. We used multiple operations of muscle firming, ranging from clenching a fist, to stretching one’s fingers, to tightening one’s calf muscles, to firming one’s biceps. We also employed different kinds of self-control tasks, ranging from those that required a person to take on immediate pain for future gain (e.g., to consider immediately disturbing information, put a hand in an ice bucket to improve blood circulation, and consume a nasty but healthy vinegar tonic; experiments 1-3) to those that required avoiding immediate pleasure for future gain (e.g., avoiding tempting food in a snack bar, choosing a healthy apple over a chocolate bar, experiments 4-5). This effect was found to work only when subjects were trying to exert will power.”

Said another way, simply clenching or firming muscles does not create willpower it only enhances it.

Check out the new game on Facebook called Healthseeker.  It was designed to use the psychological power of social game play to encourage healthier eating habits and lifestyle choices. 

The picth is that getting healthier (more specifically managing diabetes risk) can be fun and happen with a little help from your friends.  You select goals, chose a mission, earn experience points, give kudos, win badges, send challenges to friends and all the other social network dynamics that move heart-and-mind so well for hundreds of millions of people.  The game is new. It has approximately 4000 members and 400 fans.  The best description I have found so far is on Technology Review:

The challenge of this kind of game isn’t to convince people of something but to get them to act. “People are already emotionally committed to their health,” says Michael Fergusson, the founder and CEO of Ayogo. “They know they need to eat better and exercise.” But approaching that challenge all at once can seem overwhelming and thankless. “We pay them to take healthy actions,” says Fergusson. Reinforcing those small actions could turn them into habits that add up to better health.

They also discuss how other social games are changing behaviors.  Healthseeker is an important experiment. We need more like it.

How can we use the features and functions of online interaction (social networks, online 3D worlds, etc.) that have proven cognitive impact to encourage behavior change for individual and social good?

Trying to control our own thoughts and behaviors especially as they relate to consumption, procrastination and truth-telling can be a real struggle.  Turns out that framing our self-control challenges as a struggle or a work task versus something that will be fun and pleasurable is self defeating. A new study reported in ScienceDaily as  Could Learning Self Control be Enjoyable?, reveals:

“Self-control failures depend on whether people see activities involving self-control (e.g., eating in moderate quantities) as an obligation to work or an opportunity to have fun,” write authors Juliano Laran (University of Miami) and Chris Janiszewski (University of Florida, Gainesville).

The study also found that reframing self control as an opportunity to have fun improved outcomes even for impulsive individuals.  Why? A pleasurable task brings intrinsic motivations and mental energy especially when it is completed. An obligation to work requires extrinsic motivation and depletes mental energy increasing the chance for a failure in self regulation.  As cognitive designers know, changing the mental energy of a task or interactions can make all the difference when it comes to shifting behaviors.

To dig in check out the free 57-page early version of the study. The details are revealing but unfortunately there is no guidance on how we can frame our thinking about specific self control tasks to take advantage of this effect.  I did find one suggestion on the CalorieLab Blog:

 ”It’s me versus the doughnut. If I resist eating this, I have won the game. Let yourself know that the cards are being dealt and the game is about to begin. Keep score and give yourself a point in your food journal. Every time you succeed, you have strengthened your healthy habits.”

Interested to hear from readers that have other ideas on how to take our self control challenges and reframe them as something fun to do.

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.