Cognitive Design

Cold and lonely. Warm and secure.  Both appear to be deeply rooted (perhaps innate) in how our minds work, or so recent research reviewed in Hot Baths May Cure Loneliness reports.

And it is not just about the soothing effects of water. A warm cup of coffee, an ice cold conference room and a hot home cooked meal all reflect this mood-altering mechanisms.

Interested to hear from readers that have successfully used temperature in their designs or innovations.

A large-scale longitudinal study by researchers at Ohio State University uncovered new findings in the psychology of money:

 ”… the more credit card and college loan debt held by young adults aged 18 to 27, the higher their self-esteem and the more they felt like they were in control of their lives.  The effect was strongest among those in the lowest economic class.”

Control and self esteem are deep and positive psychological states that create tremendous intangible value. By the debt clock it  looks like we have about a trillion dollars worth of it.

This study has strong implications for any cognitive designer working on finance-related applications.

Source: Student Loan Calculator

The Economist and the global innovation marketplace Innocentive, have teamed up to offer a $10,000 prize to anyone that develops a novel metric for measuring tends in Human Potential.

More specifically, the metric or index should measure how well a region or a country is able to unleash and leverage intellectual energy for social and economic progress.

One example is the Gross National Happiness metric. Your metric does not have to be fully developed but you need to be able to explain how to collect that data to calculate it.

 The deadline for entries in June 20th and the winner will have expenses paid to present at the Ideas Economy conference on Human Potential in September.

The web, social media, mobile apps and online worlds/games have created a small explosion of new communication forms with unique cognitive impact. Tweets, blog posts, short homemade videos, cell phone pics, text messages, tags (like, friend, stumble, vote, etc.), emoticons, animations and avatar interactions are just a the few examples.

In addition to creating new communication forms, the mobile social web takes older forms to new heights. Take for example, the listicle.  A combination of a list with an article or more precisely, an article written as a number list, is getting a big boost on the web.  To see them in action check out some of the entries on Listicles.com:

• 8 Actors that Bailed on Superhero Movies
• 4 Reasons You City Might Ban Plastic Bags

 Or Cracked:

• 6 Things from History that Everyone Pictures Incorrectly
• 5 Ridiculous Gun Myths Everyone Believes Thanks to the Movies 

These have 4-5 million views each. Well-written listicles have strong cognitive design. They offer cool information (unique, interesting or even shocking) that can be important to us or just plain fun. All in an easy to consume package. We like lists because they offer high content with low cognitive load. You get a lot of information for very little work. By starting each listicle with a number, we signal the reader’s brain exactly how much info and mental work is in play. Interestingly, many start with the number of 7 plus or minus 2, or the number of items we can hold in short term memory at any one time.

I am interested to hear from readers that use listicles in organizational change or workplace communication efforts.  Want to learn to write good listicles and make some money? Check out Cracked’s writer forum.

The horror and numbers involved in acts of genocide should cause outrage, compassion and action but often don’t.  And this appears to be true for other forms of unthinkably bad news that impacts large groups of people such as public health issues or industry-wide safety problems.

This phenomenon, called psychic numbing, is important for anyone designing communications that involve bad news at a large-scale. There are strong cognitive biases involved.  A nice summary is provided by J.E. Robertson in his post, Why Does Mass Suffering Cause Mass Indifference:

“The lone photo, with no information and no statistics, will spark great compassion. Adding statistics or removing the photo, or naming numbers that run into the millions, will lessen the likelihood of compassion across a large population. But when enough information is given so that the reader/viewer can comprehend in intellectually resilient terms the scale of a tragic crisis, the real energy of compassion is again motivated, perhaps more effectively than by any other means.”

While these claims are grounded in research, more research is required to explore the psychology of processing bad news about large numbers of people. Fortunately, these preliminary findings  offer designable insights. We can test and refine them through the communications we create as cognitive designers.

To do cognitive design we must first fathom how customers think and feel.  Recent cognitive science has given us many insights into the how the mind works in terms of structures and processes but often has little or nothing to say about the actual content or what is on people’s minds.   So I am also on the look out for empirical studies that pick out beliefs, desires, fears, hopes, moods or other mental states that make up the particulars of how a group of people think and feel.

For example,  take the recent study reported on EurekAlert! about the effectiveness of the three-wishes question used in the AMA’s guideline for adolescent preventative services.   The idea is that a physician examining 11-18 year old patients asks “If you could have three wishes, what would they be?”.   A study looking at the responses from 110 patients found:

* 41% wished for wealth and 31% wished for a material item

* Girls tended to wish for happiness while boys wished for success

* Only 8% made wishes about personal appearance (a surprise)

Furthermore:

“Results showed that 85 percent of adolescents had wishes for themselves, 32 percent had wishes for others, and 10 percent had a wish for both themselves and others. Boys were more likely than girls to wish for things only for themselves (73 percent vs. 46 percent), while girls were more likely than boys to wish for something for their families (26 percent vs. 9 percent).”

 As simple as it is, probing wishful thinking reveals psychological needs and cognitive differences at several levels.

Good magic and placebos clearly illustrate the power of cognitive design.   Magic explicitly uses an understanding of how minds work to demonstrate to us in plain sight something we know is impossible. Placebos on the other hand accidentally play off of how minds work to demonstrate to clinicians something that should be biochemically impossible.   In both cases our minds are fooled. Optical illusions and sugar pills that none the less create real effects not because of how the world works but because of how our minds work.

That’s why I was especially intrigue by claims made by Canadian researchers that they created a machine that produces hand illusions that significantly reduce osteroarthritis pain. The machine captures a real-time video of your hand and uses some optics and simple sensors to trick you into believing your finger is being stretched or shrunk.  I captured an image of their YouTube video below.

It feels and looks real and is enough to reduce joint pain by 50% in 85% of the members in one test group.  There is other literature related to the use of optical illusions to relieve pain.

What else can we design optical placebos to do? How can the emerging technology of augmented reality (visual overlay of information on real objects) be used to create applications that leverage these cognitive effects?

The ethical consumer movement recognizes that people want to buy products and services that align with their values and moral beliefs.  They want to do business with firms that demonstrate a high degree of social responsibility. Globally fair labor practices, low-environmental impact, no animal testing and other cause-related issues are at the heart of the matter.

Value alignment, moral beliefs and ethics are all powerful psychological stuff.  That is why I was a bit surprised by the findings presented in a recent strategy+business article on Values versus Value.  In it they argue that ethical products and services (with some notable exceptions) occupy a niche and more importantly the reality of values-based purchasing might be mostly a myth:

“Proponents of ethical consumerism want to believe that people’s socially oriented choices are somehow different — perhaps made at a higher level of consciousness — from their general product choices. This is a delusion. Product ethics are more important only when individuals, comparing such ethics to all the other things that have value to them, determine that they are more important. And our research shows that for many people, this is seldom the case.”

While the points raised in the article appear valid, I am concerned that they might be generated by a lack of good cognitive design rather than anything more fundamental. It is a bit like appreciating Art. It is often difficult to do with out proper context or orientation. The authors may agree:

“For more ethically oriented consumption to really take hold, the consumer needs to become a knowledgeable participant, not a reader of labels. Rather than relying on traditional market research techniques, firms need to help their existing and future consumers become more socially conscious in their purchasing.”

Bottom line – we need to use a more sophisticated view of moral cognition in the design of ethical products and services, if we want them to change the world.

Some objects, activities and rituals are naturally soothing.  For example, a favorite shirt that is torn and tattered.  They decrease stress and help us feel centered, relax and sometimes even happy. Understanding how these soothers work and injecting that capability in other designs is a great opportunity for cognitive designers. So I am always on the look out for scientific insights into how artifacts can relax us.

Take for example, the study soon to be released in Psychological Science, Comfort Food Fights Loneliness.

“The study came out of the research program of his co-author Shira Gabriel, which has looked at social surrogates—non-human things that make people feel like they belong. Some people counteract loneliness by bonding with their favorite TV show, building virtual relationships with a celebrity or a movie character, or looking at pictures and mementos of loved ones.  Troisi and Gabriel wondered if comfort food could have the same effect by making people think of their nearest and dearest.”

And they found that it did.   As the quote above indicates, comfort food is not the only way we relieve social stress.   TV, celebrity admiration, family photos and other social surrogates work too.   From a cognitive design standpoint we need to understand the features and functions that cause soothing and why they work.

Products and services that make it easy to give money in support of important causes (prosocial spending) make us feel good.  I can give money to fight cancer in children when I make a purchase at the grocery store or send a text to help citizens in Japan cope with one of the biggest natural disasters of all time.

This is good cognitive design- adding specific features and functions to existing products to generate a specific mental state. Prosocial spending engages the psychology of generosity, it makes us happy and gives us well being. But how much lift do we get? How universal is the impulse to be generous?

A recent working paper from Harvard Business School found that the emotional benefits of generosity are significant and universal or occur across cultures. They looked at survey data from a 136 countries and did a causal study in two countries to conclude:

“In contrast to traditional economic thought—which places self-interest as the guiding principle of human motivation—our findings suggest that the reward experienced from helping others may be deeply ingrained in human nature, emerging in diverse cultural and economic contexts.”

This is a strong signal to cognitive designers. Enabling opportunities for prosocial spending – or other forms of generosity-  will generate significant psychological impact for most groups.