Cognitive Design

A recent research study on consumer decision making found:

“When decisions are difficult because the choices are equally appealing, people often become more positive in their attitudes and behaviors toward their chosen option after they choose it. But the authors found that this enhancement of a product is surprisingly fragile, and collapses easily in the face of even minor negative information about it.”

This “positivity bubble” (as the researchers describe it) is no surprise to cognitive designers. It comes from our need to get more mental energy out of an interaction then we put in.  Making a choice especially between options that are very similar requires a lot of mental energy.   To compensate we hype-up the value of the choice we make to create compensating meaning and positive emotional energy.  The positivity bubble gives us energy to balance out or exceed what we used in making the decision. As it is primarily hype it bursts at the first sign of conflicting information. This collapse can lead to remorse and long-term dissatisfaction.  And this can happen when the stakes are highest. To quote the study:

“Difficult decision scenarios with heightened stakes—such as shopping for expensive durable goods, choosing a gift for a loved one, or choosing a job, college, or house—are precisely those in which people would most hope to have accurate and stable attitudes,” the authors write. “Perversely, our results suggest that in these cases their attitudes might actually be the most fragile and bubble-like, appearing strong but actually quite vulnerable to collapse.”

This highlights a moment of truth from a cognitive design standpoint.  A case where if we don’t properly manage the psychological need for mental energy we may in fact end up with a bad case of decision remorse. To take a deeper dive check out the article, Fragile Enhancement of Attitudes Following Difficult Decisions.

Getting people to think about something specific has powerful cognitive effects. Focusing attention and loading a specific mental model fills our working memory with content and activates episodic memories. This in turn can impact how we perceive, learn, solve problems, plan, navigate and behave. A single word, image or interaction can cause an avalanche of incidental mental processing. This is one thing that makes cognitive design such a powerful intervention. But it can have unexpected side effects.

A great example was just published in Psychological Science, as You are What You Eat: Fast Food and Inpatients. To quote:

“We found that even an unconscious exposure to fast-food symbols can automatically increase participants’ reading speed when they are under no time pressure and that thinking about fast food increases preferences for time-saving products while there are potentially many other product dimensions to consider. More strikingly, we found that mere exposure to fast-food symbols reduced people’s willingness to save and led them to prefer immediate gain over greater future return, ultimately harming their economic interest.”

This means that merely flashing the logo of the golden arches can cause a booting up of a “fast food” mental model that incidentally but powerfully alters seemingly unrelated reading speed, decision-making and behavior. And this is true for more than fast food….

 Source:  The Entrepreneurs State of Mind 2010

Research into what makes us happy and why has exploded over the last 10 year.  Books, conferences and even dedicated journals on happiness have been cranked out in ever increasing numbers.  It can be a little confusing. What do we really know about happiness? I have been careful on this blog to discuss only those results that have clear implications for design and are rooted in evidence.  After all, happiness is a major challenge for the cognitive designer.

PsychCentral recently reported on 5 Reliable Finding From Happiness Research. Although we have touch on them in other posts, it is an excellent summary highlighting:

1. Experience not things makes us happy

2. Relationships are the key to happiness

3. Once you reach a certain income level more money does not mean more happiness

4. Windfalls such as winning a lottery do NOT create lasting happiness

5. Half the factors that determine happiness are under your control.

Points 1 and 5  justify taking a cognitive design approach to happiness.  Points 2, 3 and 4 give general but important guidance to creating specific designs for happiness.

Many of the posts on this blog have to do with designing better solutions for healthcare. After all,  the delivery and consumption of healthcare is primarily a cognitive and behavior-change issue.   I was very happy to see the latest study from the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. It is a survey of the activities, beliefs and needs of healthcare consumers from around the world, including the US. Although many of the results are contextual from a design standpoint, some do get to specific functional needs. For example, the summary of the 2009 study found:

* 7 in 10 say they would participate in a wellness program if they were given financial incentives, such as a reduced insurance premium or monetary reward

* 13 percent of consumers have visited a retail clinic this year and 30 percent said they would do so if it cost 50 percent or less than seeing a doctor in a doctor’s office

* 42 percent want access to an online personal health record connected to their doctor’s office

* 65 percent of consumers are interested in home monitoring devices that enable them to check their condition and send the results to their doctor

The study supports the conclusion that healthcare costs do change behaviors and consumers are willing to embrace innovations in self-care that meet their cognitive needs – personalization, control and convenience.

The cognition behind completing other people’s sentences is decisively explored in the article, Predicting Syntax  published in the March Issue of the Journal Language. The article argues our ability to predict what others are going to say comes from knowledge of linguistic probabilities that in turn are developed through day-to-day experience with language. We have knowledge of most probable phrases in a wide variety of contexts and use that knowledge to do many things including completing other peoples sentences.

Discovering the “probable phrases” at work in a given context should provide important insights for guiding all sorts of cognitive design efforts.  A few are mentioned in a press release by the Linguistic Society of America:

“This intrinsic ability to predict based on probability has implications for language comprehension. Educators engaged in foreign language instruction might effectively focus their initial efforts on the most probable sentence constructions. Entrepreneurs engaged in marketing their products or services might use the most probable phrases in preparing their advertising messages. These research findings on linguistic probability may also be helpful in making computerized language more natural. Another practical application would be in the refinement of tools used in profiling and diagnosing those with language disorders. As noted by the authors in an interview, “Linguistic patterns are important in predicting comprehension. If we can make better use of these patterns to enhance comprehension, then we can improve people’s ability to understand one another.” 

Interested to hear from readers that have suggestions for how we can discover probable phrases during the design process.

As we age the performance of working memory changes.  A big change that researchers have recently uncovered is that we lose the capacity to filter out irrelevant information when we try and form memories.   The inability to ignore distractions leads to hyper-binding or encoding irrelevant bits of information. I covered this earlier in Hyper-Binding and Memory in Elderly.

But what is a cognitive designer to do? How can we adjust our designs to overcome this change in the performance of working memory?   One approach involves making older adults aware of potential distraction before they occur. In principle this could help them focus or use metacognition to compensate.  A new study just reported in Cortex, an international journal focused on cognition and the nervous system, dashes any hopes of that working.

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Working for a difficult boss is a big challenge. Working for a bullying, abusive or aggressive boss can be a nightmare.   Dealing with such difficult relationships is in fact a cognitive design problem.  Toxic relationships are most often rooted in unmet cognitive (intellectual, affective, motivational, volitional) needs.  

Discovering the unmet needs is the first step in designing a fix. A new article on Strategy+Business,  The Real Reason Your Boss is a Bully, offers some interesting insight. They bypass the often quoted psychological needs of ambition and need to feel powerful to get to a much more widespread issue:

“In fact, the authors conclude that aggressive behavior on the part of managers is often the result of self-recognized incompetence; in other words, vindictive bosses may be in over their heads — and their feelings of inadequacy cause them to take out their frustrations on subordinates.”

This finding clearly outlines the aggressive manager’s unmet cognitive needs.

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.

I am often asked by clients to help design  presentations, documents or websites to influence decision-making. How do we present information to support the cognitive needs of different types of decision makers? One tool I have had great success with is the five-decision making styles discussed in Change the Way Your Persuade.

The five styles include charismatics, thinkers, skeptics, followers and controllers. I have found these profiles fit experience extremely well. The article if full of useful information for the cognitive designer including characteristics, mental models and prominent examples for each style.  Advice brimming with design implications for how to persuade each style is also given.