Cognitive Design

As a adviser I often work with leaders or other professionals that are struggling to make sense of what seems to be crazy, counter productive and even irrational behavior in their organizations.  This “crazy behavior” messes with everything from making good decisions and implementing change to treating customers well. Cognitive designers can play an important role in such situations by bring models of how minds work to bear on the problem, identifying the type of dysfunctional thinking in the context, determining root causes and implementing intervention that mitigate or leverage it.

Sounds a bit like therapy and it is. Indeed, some of the best tools for tackling this challenge come from cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). In CBT the therapist assumes the patient’s unwanted behavior is being generated by faulty or counter productive beliefs or thinking patterns. The therapist work to surface and change the counter productive thinking pattern in order to end or modify the unwanted behavior.  CBT has be very successful over the last 20 years on everything from depression to obsessive compulsive disorder to anxiety, grief and even procrastination.

CBT is no silver bullet but it does offer the cognitive designer many field tested frameworks and tools for understanding how minds are working.   For example, cognitive distortions or the thinking patterns that are often at the root cause of counter productive behaviors is an extremely value tool. For an introduction check out, 15 common Cognitive Distortions, on the PsychCentral blog. The post gives you a quick definition of common distorts such as over generalizing, black-and-white thinking and the fallacy of fairness.  I often use this list when first introducing the idea to a client because they can immediate recognize them at work in their context.  Suddenly the crazy behavior begins to make a little sense.

Of course spotting cognitive distortions in action is one thing, figuring out how to mitigate or even leverage them is another.

Interested to hear from readers that use cognitive distortions in their consulting, teaching or innovation practices.

From cute kittens to hideous centipedes animals of all types have big cognitive impact. People interacting with animals in positive and negative ways can amp up the impact. Take for example, a baby playing (safely) with a puppy.

And this effect runs deep. According to research done by CalTech and reported by NPR we have specific brain cells in our Amygdala (emotions center for the brain) that respond to the presence of animals but not other people, places or objects.  These cells remain active as we automatically track animals and can detect small changes in them from scene to scene as compared to our ability to detect small changes in objects.

More generally:

“The finding confirms earlier work suggesting that the human brain is particularly responsive to animals. Behavioral studies, for instance, have found that people pay more attention to animals and people than to things.”

Leveraging this hardwiring, cognitive designers can use animal-based features and functions to get and hold attention and invoke specific emotional responses.

Cognitive designers spend a lot of energy understanding, leveraging and mitigating the mental biases that dominate our learning, thinking, decision-making and socializing. While cognitive biases or the rules that make-us-human have been extensively studied,  most innovators (except for magician and clinicians that use placebos) have not even scratched the surface of leveraging and mitigating them.

And new insights from research on cognitive biases arrive from various laboratories daily. Take for example, recent research reported by the Association for Psychological Science on the bias to rate ourselves above average. They studied 1600 subjects in 15 culturally diverse countries and found:

“Virtually everywhere, people rate themselves above average. But the more economically unequal the country, the greater was its participants’ self-enhancement.”

This means the self-enhancement bias is likely maximal in the US.

The key question for cognitive designers is: How can we use (leverage or mitigate)  this bias to improve a product, service, work process, customer experience, employee development program or other artifact?

Many types of behavior change programs end up relying on communication or messaging to do a lot of the work.  The right type of messaging can make all the difference.  In cognitive design we have long advocated change messaging that is short, just-in-time, emotionally positive and behavior-specific (tell me exactly what to do).  Knowledge cards, a small-step behavior change program, are designed to follow precisely that prescription.

Interesting new research from the University of Michigan supports and extends this idea. The study focused on the impact of text messages sent to mobile phones to help Teens manage their weight.  Not surprising they found that specific instructions from peers and sincere positive encouragement were preferred. They also found:

“Other negative response came from the mention of unhealthy food and behavior, even with references to healthier options; Teens began to crave unhealthy foods after being asked about them. Reflective questions, like “What does being healthy mean for you? How does screen time fit in with your goals? How could cutting back on it help improve your health? were also ineffective.”

It is not clear if the preferred messages will actually cause behavior change.  It is clear those that are not preferred or even disliked will not.  This is an important finding because we sometimes design communications in change programs to invoke comparative and reflective thinking. While that is critical for some applications it will clearly backfire for others.

PAIs or positive activity interventions are one of the most important practical findings to come out of the positive psychology movement.   These are simple techniques that can be used by individuals or groups to increase positive mental energy, mood and even general happiness.   Example PAIs include counting your blessing, sending letters of gratitude or thank-you notes, positive affirmations or meditating on positive feelings, using your signature skills or strengthens to address a problem and intentionally performing acts of kindness.  There is strong evidence that such simple practices are a great way to generate significant positive mental energy, the very fuel needed to sustained long and challenging change efforts.

While I have seen PAIs produce strong results in practice, I was a bit surprised by the recent research article, Delivering Happiness that presents evidence that they could be an effective tool for managing clinical depression.   That puts the cognitive impact of PAIs on a whole new level and makes them even more important as tools for improving the workplace.

I am interested to hear from readers that have used PAIs in a change effort, training program, process improvement intervention or some other workplace improvement effort.

Adding a specific think-and-feel experience to a product for customers or an internal service for employees is one way to use cognitive design to differentiate an offering.  You provide the same core functionality as a competitor but you differentiate by delivering it in a way that meets a deeply felt psychological need. For example, a product or service that makes a donation to a worthy cause when purchased. That delivers a small but potent “feel-good” by doing good experience for the shopper.

According to The Integer Group, how you make the donation can have a big impact. In a recent research study they found:

“When choosing between two brands that benefit a cause, 43 percent of women say they choose the brand that donates with every purchase over a brand that donates a set amount.” 

They also found that causes with an emotional message devoted to disease prevention generated a more intense feel-good for women.

These psychographic findings have clear implications for cognitive designers working in product and service innovation.

Androids or human like robots are growing in numbers. We see them in video games and films as well as in the real-world as service bots.    Some androids gives us the creeps others we like. A brain scanning study just reported from UC San Diego, Your Brain on Androids, helps to explain this difference.  It turns out that androids that look too human but don’t also move in a perfectly human way, give us the creeps. On the other hand, androids that move more like robots and look more like robots are fine.

Our brains expect a match between the level of human-like appearance and motion

Not a surprise to readers of the cognitive design blog. If it looks human but moves robot we have colliding mental models and cognitive dissonance.  If the visual differences are subtle and we cannot put our finder on the source of cognitive dissonance it could get creepy.  The importance of the UC San Diego study is that they saw this in our neural hardware and were able to study the range of the effect.  The finding are summarized in terms of the “uncanny valley effect” when our feelings about an android suddenly go negative because it looks too human.

From a cognitive design perspective, this finding about the mismatch between appearance and motion could generalize across artifacts to produce opportunities for innovation.   For example, looks like a car but does not move like a car. The challenge is to find a way to leverage it to produce interest or positive mental energy.  In this example, a human doing a robot dance has nearly 6 million view.

 Source of Image: UC San Diego news release.

Placebos, or rituals dressed up as medical treatments that lack any active ingredients, definitely abate symptoms in many circumstances.  They can change how we think-and-feel about our illness or disease. Indeed, they are so effective at moving our hearts and minds we have explored their implications as a more general tool for organizational and individual change here on the cognitive design blog.

But an important question remains, do they go beyond heart-and-mind impact to create the underlying physiological changes that drugs with active ingredients do? Is belief somehow altering biology? The answer appears to be no, at least within the scope of a recent clinical study of placebos reported by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.  They studied the physiological impacts of placebos on Asthma patients and found:

 ”while placebos had no effect on lung function (one of the key objective measures that physicians depend on in treating asthma patients) when it came to patient-reported outcomes, placebos were equally as effective as albuterol in helping to relieve patients’ discomfort and their self-described asthma symptoms.”

Abating symptoms and relieving discomfort is a significant psychological impact.

This is a very important finding for cognitive designers. It demonstrates that designs (in this case a placebo) that create distinct think-and-feel effects deliver significant value even if they do not produce underlying changes in physiology. Placebos as “pure play” cognitive designs create real value!

Over the last 30 years or so  cognitive science has empirically shattered many of our basic assumptions about how the mind works.  For example, we traditionally viewed human memory as a passive observe-store-record device that objectively captured information about the world. Now we understand memory as actively being constructed (rather than recorded) from information, expectations and mental models. We dynamically create our understanding of the world, we don’t document it like a tape recorder.

To see how dramatically our understanding of what we hear is shaped by the expectations we have, take six minutes to experience Stairway to Heaven Run Backwards.

Priming effects or other features and functions that create expectations before perceptions, are powerful cognitive design techniques.  We make perceptions we do not have them.

According to research from Columbia Business School, we tend to artificially complicate our decision-making processes to match our expectation of hard a choice should be.  The harder we think a choice should be, the more complex we make the decision-making process. These artificial complications lead to poor decision outcomes and appear to infest a wide-range of life decisions about jobs, major purchases, choice of doctors and so on.  For example, I may pass on the best choice if it comes too quickly or easily when I expect the choice to be hard.

A release of EurekAlert sums of the key finding nicely:

“…. under certain conditions, consumers actually complicate their choices and bolster inferior options. Specifically, when an important decision seems too easy, consumers artificially reconstruct their preferences in a manner that increases choice conflict. The researchers conclude that when it comes to big decisions, people try to achieve a match between the expected effort of making a choice and the effort they think they should make in order to reach the decision. They term this the “effort compatibility principle”.?

Examples of preferences that shift to increase choice conflict included items such as size of the team you would work on when comparing job offers and if a doctor would make house calls or not when selecting doctors. These factors did not matter until a clearly superior choice was presented, making the decision “too easy” compared to the subject’s expectation.  Rather than select the best choice based on criteria they subject did prefer, they made irrelevant factors important to complicate the choice.

Whether this is the effort compatibility principle in action, or just represents we don’t really know what we prefer until pushed, the findings are important for cognitive designers.

Not only do we need to find and manage cognitive biases that may be at work to oversimplify or distort a decision-making process, we must also be on the look out for and manage expectation effects that can over complicate or distort a decision-making process.

We may be blinded to the easy win when we think the decision should be hard.

Source for Image: Retropolis Transit Authority.