Cognitive Design

A major challenge in cognitive design is getting good data on mental states. Knowing what people are really thinking and feeling as they perform certain tasks, test a prototype or just go about their daily routine is hard to do.   Brain scans are not practical and self reports and observations are limited in value.

So I am always on the lookout for new ways of measuring mental states outside a laboratory setting.  Samsung has developed a prototype smart phone to do just that.  MIT’s Technology Review reports:

“For example, it monitors certain inputs, such as the speed at which a user types, how often the “backspace” or “special symbol” buttons are pressed, and how much the device shakes. These measures let the phone postulate whether the user is happy, sad, surprised, fearful, angry, or disgusted…”

While this is still a low-accuracy prototype it is suggestive. Perhaps soon we will have an App that can be used to infer and record mental states under a wide variety of conditions.   Being able to do that with just an App rather than special purpose hardware is the key.

Researchers from the Department of Preventative Medicine at Northwestern University are trying to do just that. They want to detect and help manage moods using an ordinary smart phone and App called Mobilyze:

“Mobilyze uses data from sensors already embedded in the phone, such as GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi, accelerometers, etc., and uses them to identify patient states.  The aim is to develop an automated system for detecting mood-related states, without requiring patient self-report.  This context-aware application on the mobile phone has the potential to address non-adherence and other treatment difficulties as they occur in real-time. “

This App is clinically focused but signals we are close to having the technology to measure mental states using a smart phone. That will be a big shot in the arm for an empirical approach to cognitive design.

When you get sick  how you think about your illness strongly determines the decisions you make and how you behave.  Do you believe you will get better? How long will it take? Is the cause mysterious? Is the treatment plan offered by your doctor worth following?

Beliefs shape decisions and decisions shape behaviors. This is no surprise to readers of the cognitive design blog. What is a bit surprising is how big an impact your mental model about an illness can have on the speed, quality and cost of recovery.   Consider a recent meta-study on patient perception of illness:

“The authors find that people’s illness perceptions bear a direct relationship to several important health outcomes, including their level of functioning and ability, utilization of health care, adherence to treatment plans laid out by health care professionals, and even overall mortality.”

The good news is:

“Research confirms that brief, straightforward psychoeducational interventions can modify negative illness beliefs and lead to improvements over a range of different health outcomes.”

This means a little cognitive design in clinician-patient communication can directly translate into strong medicine.

Image: Medfest 2012

Emory university reports on a recent brain scanning study that reveals we are using different cognitive processes to make decisions involving sacred value versus those that involve cost-benefit logic. Sacred values run the deepest and involve as sense of self and culture as determined, for example,  by ethical principles, national identity or belief in God.

This is important for designer involved in creating behavior change. As the authors point out:

“Our findings indicate that it’s unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people’s behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives.”

Sacred values require special handling.

The psychology of money has many twists and turns.  The nuances may seem academic to some but they are fundamentally important for those of us that design incentives and rewards, financial products or educational materials about money management. That’s why I am always on the look out for new scientific research into how we think about money and wealth.

For example, Psychological Research recently reported some interesting findings:

“People generally like assets and dislike debt, but they tend to focus more on one or the other depending on their net worth,” says Sussman.  “We find that if you have positive net worth, your attention is more likely to be drawn to debt, which stands out against the positive background.” On the other hand, “when things are bad, people find comfort in their assets, which get more attention.”

These findings contradict our normal assumptions and are strong enough to guide design decisions. For example, a person in debt may take out a loan to buy a consumer item when a person with net worth may forgo it.

In cognitive design we seek to discover deeply felt and unmet psychological needs and create experiences that satisfy them.   Learning to discover deeply felt psychological needs is not hard if you know where to look.

Spend some time watching individuals or groups as they make decisions. Often the process pushes deeply felt psychological needs out into the open.  For example, it is fairly easy to spot those that try to maximize a decision by searching for the best option from those that are satisficers or are happy with the first option that works.

Maximizers have a need for certainty, one that often cannot be met within the time and resource constraints of everyday life.  This can leave them dissatisfied with the choices they make.  After all, how can they know they really have uncovered and selected the best option?  This lack of satisfaction can have many side effects. It can lead to a lack of commitment (e.g buyer’s remorse), an attempt to re-open a decision and a lot of stress.

Research at Florida State University (FSU) further reveals the psychology of maximizers:

“Because maximizers want to be certain they have made the right choice,” the authors contend, “they are less likely to fully commit to a decision.” And most likely, they are less happy in their everyday lives.”

They point out that maximizers are likely to second guess themselves even after burning a lot of mental energy in search of the best option.

This creates a serious challenge for cognitive designers. What can we do to reshape the decision experience to increase the satisfaction and commitment of maximizers with the outcome?

The FSU researchers provide some insight when it comes to consumer choice:

“Maximizers get nervous when they see an ‘All Sales Are Final’ sign because it forces them to commit,…”

And it is not just about buying things. If you are trying to use a consensus-based decision model at work, you need the commitment of maximizers on your team.

What can we add to the decision experience that meets the psychological needs of those that seek certainty? It won’t be certainty and admonishments to “chill out” miss the point. What can we do?

Emotions play a huge role in how our minds work. They shape and sometimes determine how we learn, make decisions, solve problems, change behavior and interact with others.  Decoding emotions is critical step in cognitive design no matter what application you are working on.

Emotions are visible through actions, body-language (especially facial expressions) and words.  Learning to read emotions in people and animals is not only good cognitive design, it builds emotional intelligence.   A well-known observational technique plays off the assumption that our biology determines how our facial muscles react when we experience a basic emotion such as surprise, fear, joy, disgust, anger, contempt and sadness. I frown when sad, my eyes widened when surprised and so on.

Of course it is more complex than that. For a deeper dive, check out Humintell’s microexpression recognition training, especially the tab on The Science.

Over the years of use I have noticed individual differences in how emotions play out on faces, perhaps due to context or something more fundamental.  For instance, some people narrow their eyes when surprised or smile when angry. While I could never prove they were in a base emotional state and exhibited a facial expressions that conflicts with the standard view, my experience supported it.  And the closer I looked the more variation I found.

Now there is a small but growing body of scientific work that is focused on the variations in the facial expression of emotions.  A recent press release by the Association for Psychological Science highlights some of the work:

“Contrary to what many psychological scientists think, people do not all have the same set of biologically “basic” emotions, and those emotions are not automatically expressed on the faces of those around us, according to the author of a new article published in …”

The note goes on to claim:

“Some scientists have proposed that emotions regulate your physical response to a situation, but there’s no evidence, for example, that a certain emotion usually produces the same physical changes each time it is experienced, Barrett says. “There’s tremendous variety in what people do and what their bodies and faces do in anger or sadness or in fear,” she says. People do a lot of things when they’re angry. Sometimes they yell; sometimes they smile.”

The implications for cognitive design are clear.  General rules for decoding emotions from facial expressions are fine but they only go so far. In complex or high-risk situations the real value might be in the variations from those rules.

Source of Image:  Seven Basic Emotions

The answer is yes according to a recent study, Time Discounting Predicts Creditworthiness. 471 subjects were tasked with deciding if they wanted a smaller immediate payment or a larger payment farther in the future. Subjects willing to wait for larger payments further in the future have credit or FICO scores that were on average 30 points higher than their less patient counter parts.

Your FICO score predicts how likely you are to pay a credit card bill, car loan, mortgage or repay any money your borrow.   This means how impatient we are shapes how we discount or value the future which in turn helps to determine how likely we are to default on a loan obligation.

While a 30 point difference (on average) is not a blow-out it is significant enough to change a credit decision.

This study helps emphasize the importance of understanding the psychology of impatience when we are designing financial, health and other future-discounted products and services.

While we constantly call for new ideas and creative approaches to persistent problems we dislike the uncertainty. We dislike the uncertainty we feel about our ability to come up with a creative idea (especially in a group) and we dislike the uncertainty associated with trying to act on a creative idea. According to new research reported in Association for Psychological Science, this uncertainty may be so strong it signals a hidden bias against creativity.

I have seen this bias in action for many years.  From a cognitive design standpoint, we need to ask if there are better ways for organizations to manage the psychology of creativity as it relates to uncertainty.  How can we maintain expansive thinking and action even in the face of risk?   Trying to artificially reduce uncertainty by saying such things as “we tolerate failure” does not appear to address the need.

People don’t use logic, utility theory or other forms of rational inference when making decisions about money, careers, relationships, purchases or other important matters. Instead we rely on emotions, behavioral impulses and a small army of short-cuts known as cognitive biases that work very well in some circumstances and terribly in others.  At least that is the story behind the modern view of mind and one that cognitive design has deeply embraced.  But it leaves something important out, namely there will be a subset of decision-makers that do in fact make decisions rationally. At least that is the finding from a recent research study, Cognitive Control and Individual Differences in Economic Ultimatum Decision-Making reported on PLOS One.   The researchers:

“…tested subjects’ behavior in the Ultimatum Game, in which two players have to split a sum of money. One player makes an offer, and the other must accept or refuse the offer. If it is declined, neither receives any money. The rational choice, and the scenario predicted by most economic models, would be for the first player to offer only a small amount to the second player, and for the second player to accept this offer, since something is better than nothing. However, most people do not behave this way. The first player often offers an even split, and the second player often rejects an offer of an uneven split, likely due to strong emotional motives.”

There are however a number of people that do follow the rational model of offering and accepting a amount much less than half. After all, it is the rational thing to do!  The group is small and includes individuals with high cognitive control or the ability to resist impulsive tendencies.

While it is not clear how far this will generalize, it offers an important reminder to cognitive designers. In our rush to leverage and mitigate cognitive biases be sure not to exclude those operating with logic and high cognitive control. The research is also interesting because it presents a way to use a simple task and brain scan to identify high cognitive control.

Hunger is a powerful biological and psychological state.  And we can “hunger” for things other than food. As the saying goes,  some people  hunger for power and possessions.

Recent research at  Northwestern University tested what we can hunger for in the broader sense by measuring salivation.  The idea is when we are really hungry for food we salivate so we might also drool when we hunger for other things. And we do!

“Results of an experiment show that individuals salivate to money when induced to feel a low power state but not when induced to feel a high power states.  A second experiment showed that men salivate to sports cars when primed with a mating goal but not a control condition.”

Designers interested in creating “objects of desire” should pay special attention to the role of  priming in the experiments. Priming means stimulating subjects to create a specific frame of mind before presenting the test stimulus.  Money by itself won’t cause me to salivate but if I am primed to perceive it as a way to increase power it might. Likewise a sports car by itself will not cause me to salivate unless I am primed to see it as a means to mate.