Cognitive Design

Having active social connections with family, friends and neighbors increases your chance of survival by 50% or so claims a meta study done by Brigham Young University, Stayin’ alive: That’s what friends are for.

Said another way, not having social relationships  contributes to your mortality risk (chance of dying) as much smoking (15 cigarettes), not exercising or being an alcoholic and twice as much as being obese.   Relationships here need to be active, personal and can be positive or negative.

Cognitive designers are aware of the power of relationships for creating meaning and supporting a wide range of mental processes. This work suggests that is also fundamental for health and life for the following reason:

“When someone is connected to a group and feels responsibility for other people, that sense of purpose and meaning translates to taking better care of themselves and taking fewer risks,” Holt-Lunstad said.”

This has clear implications for designers.  Other implications include the redesign of insurance products or underwriting guidelines to leverage the predictive value of “being connected to a group”.

You cannot achieve service excellence without meeting the cognitive (intellectual and emotional) needs of your employees and customers. For a great billion dollar example of this check on the new book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose.

If you want to get a free taste, read the excerpt provided by Strategy+Business  (registration required). Here is my favorite part:

“At Zappos, we don’t measure call times (our longest phone call was almost six hours long!), and we don’t upsell. We just care about whether the rep goes above and beyond for every customer. We don’t have scripts because we trust our employees to use their best judgment when dealing with each and every customer. We want our reps to let their true personalities shine during each phone call so that they can develop a personal emotional connection (internally referred to as PEC) with the customer.”

From scripts, measurement of the “average handle time” and upsell to personal emotional connections.  That is a shift from meeting the cognitive needs of managers trying to control the service to the employees and customers that are experiencing the service. Bravo!

Brain chemistry drives a lot of human behavior. Some of the natural drugs or chemicals that play key roles are dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline, cortisol and insulin.  So I am always on the lookout for scientific studies that link brain chemicals to cognition and behavior that can have implications for designers.

For example, the ScienceDaily just reported on a study that shows how levels of dopamine impact decisions around self control. Higher levels of dopamine lead to impulsive. behavior. To quote:

“The researchers found that every subject was more likely to behave more impulsively — choosing the ‘smaller, sooner’ option — when levels of dopamine in the brain were boosted. . On the whole, the number of sooner options chosen increased by almost a third, although each subject varied on this measure.”

This is a significant effect.   How can designer make use of it?

One of the major lessons learned about how the mind works over the last couple of decades is that it is fully dependent on the body. Cognition is embodied or at least partially determined by bodily actions, interactions and so-called “memories”.   Talking with our hands, solving a problem by walking or pacing, moving to learn and so on.  Now there is new evidence that we blink as an embodiment of day dreaming.  The idea is that we blink to help shut out perceptual input that would otherwise require attention and interfere with our wandering mind.  ScienceDaily has a nice summary of the study, Out of Mind, out of Sight: Blinking Eyes Indicate Mind Wandering. To quote:

 ”What we suggest is that when you start to mind-wander, you start to gate the information even at the sensory endings — you basically close your eyelid so there’s less information coming into the brain,” says Smilek.

This is part of a shift in how scientists are thinking about the mind, he says. Psychologists are realizing that “you can’t think about these mental processes, like attention, separately from the fact that the individual’s brain is in a body, and the body’s acting in the world.” The mind doesn’t ignore the world all by itself; the eyelids help.”

Designs that support mind wandering can be important for stress management and creativity.

Be sure to consider the new study, Money Giveth and Money Taketh Away: The Dual Effect of Wealth on Happiness.   Key findings for cognitive designers include:

 -  A correlation between wealth (or just the thought of wealth) and the ability to savor experiences

-   The ability to savor predicts your degree of happiness

So wealth blunts our ability to savor and therefore undercuts the mechanism that is the source of most of our happiness.

Getting to the full article requires a subscription. If you don’t have one check out the recap of the study on the New Brain Blog.

Organizations are keen on creating and keeping trusting relationships with employees, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders.   Trust makes everything far easier.  Sometimes trust is damaged or lost so we need “trust recovery” processes. A good example is service recovery for customers that did not receive the appropriate experience. Psychological factors play the dominant role in trust. This means trust recovery processes are primarily a cognitive design challenge.

So I am always on the look out for new scientific insights into the nature of trust that could be useful for designers. For example, How Implicit Beliefs Influence Trust, from the Wharton School of Business offers several designable insights.

“After a trust violation, some people are quick to forgive, whereas others never trust again. In this report, we identify a key characteristic that moderates trust recovery: implicit beliefs of moral character. Individuals who believe that moral character can change over time (incremental beliefs) are more likely to trust their counterpart following an apology and trustworthy behavior than are individuals who believe that moral character cannot change (entity beliefs). We demonstrate that a simple but powerful message can induce either entity or incremental beliefs about moral character.

 Concerning the simple but powerful message:

“… targets who have incremental beliefs may be particularly receptive to trust-repair efforts that include a promise to change. In contrast, targets who have entity beliefs may be particularly receptive to trust-repair efforts that include denials or attempts to deflect blame.”

The bottom line – cognitive designers doing work in trust should include incremental/entity beliefs in any psychographic profile that is developed and tune the design accordingly.

The journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking is an excellent resource for cognitive designers working on Internet applications of all types. High quality and readable articles reveal many designable insights and loads of psychographic information.

You can sample a free issues in December 2009 and February 2010.  For examples of material relevant to cognitive design issues check out The Theory of Planned Behavior Applied to Young People’s Use of Social Networking Sites or The Attitudes, Feelings and Experiences of Online Gamers - A Qualitative Analysis.

Knowing how someone thinks about time tells you a lot about their cognitive needs, tendencies and biases. So I am always on the lookout for new insights into the psychology of time that might be useful for cognitive designers.

Earlier I blogged on The Time Paradox, a must read for all designers interested in understanding how clients think about time. The chart below offers a provocative hypothesis, namely there might be a best (most strongly correlated to happiness) time style.

                  [Image Source: Time Paradox Surveys] 

Your time style includes an orientation – past, present or future and an attitude – positive, negative, hopeful, fearful, etc. Past positive and past negative styles are just that. Present fatalistic focuses on the now and believes fate determines what happens in life. Present hedonistic focuses on now and is driven by the pleasure principle. The transcendental future style is focused on an unbounded future (death is a new beginning).  The red dots outline the authors position on the ideal time style. Do you agree?

Another interesting claim about the psychology of time was recently reported in a Research Digest Blog post, Doubt Cast on the Maxim that Time Goes Faster as You Get Older.  A couple of studies are quoted that look at the factors that drive our perception of how quickly time moves. Findings include, for example:

“Age accounted for four per cent of the variance in how quickly participants said the last ten years had passed and just one per cent of the perception of time’s speed in general. By contrast, how busy and rushed people reported feeling accounted for ten per cent of the variance in subjective speed of time. Consistent with this, women reported feeling more rushed than men, on average, and they perceived time to go by more quickly.”

Feeling rushed creates tremendous cognitive load and psychological stress. Understanding the objective and subjective factors that drive it is important for effective cognitive design.

Bottled water is a bit of a mystery. Its use has exploded and it is mainly purchased by people that have a nearly free source of water in their homes.  We are paying a lot for something that is nearly free.

I have long argued that the popularity of bottled water stems from satisfying a cognitive need that tap water from our homes does not. And I am not talking about portability.  An interesting new book by Peter Gelick, Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water, puts some teeth behind that argument.

Gelick, a renown water expert, drives down into the history, science and current use of bottled water to reveal the primary cause, namely our belief that bottled water will make us “healthier, skinnier, or more popular.” 

There is little or no science to support this. The benefits of bottled water like the benefits of a new book on a fad diet or the purchase of a lottery ticket lie mainly in the hopefulness they make us feel.  In short, the value is derived nearly exclusively from the mental state (think-and-feel) created by its use.  A clear case of cognitive design in action.

A one-day symposium, Headspace, was held in New York to explore the broad design implications of scent. Seed magazine covers it with a  great slide show, The Scent of Design.  It is worth a look from a cognitive design standpoint. One item that caught my interest:

Yuka Hiyoshi and Ayse Birsel of Birsel+Seck worked with thier perfume team to explore the profound connections between memories and scents. They decided to craft odors based upon the concept of “threshold moments”—life experiences that are at once deeply personal and yet collectively shared by nearly all people. Hiyoshi and Birsel’s objects are designed to fit in the palm of your hand, playing on the powerful capacity of scent to capture a specific moment in time.

These threshold moment are birth babyhood, puberty, sex, partnership, empty nest and death.  The objects are pebbles and prototypes are shown below.