Cognitive Design

All cognitive designers and change managers should check out the work by Dr Neff, an associate professor of human development and culture at the University of Texas at Austin on Self Compassion.  The site includes assessment instruments, exercises, research articles, videos and more.

The concept of self compassion is straightforward  - having a mindful and open hearted or kind reguard for yourself especially when faced with your shortcomings. But according to the latest research it can have a big impact on how well we adapt to change. For example, a recent study showed that even a modest self-compassion intervention could significantly impact eating habits.

Including specific self-compassion interventions (positive self-talk, journaling, best/worse trait analysis, mindfulness training, etc.)  in your next organizational change program could improve outcomes. This is especially true since our traditional approach to organizational change tends to emphasize what is wrong and implicitly encourages people to be self critical.

Interested to hear from readers that have used self-compassion interventions in change programs.

One of the major differences between cognitive design and related fields such as human factors is that cognitive design seeks to create specific mental states in people. In extreme cognitive design, the mental state (e.g. pride, humor, comfort or awe) is exactly what is being designed. So I am always on the lookout for precise theories of mental states with clear design implications. Equations are the best.

Take for example the work of Alastair Clarke on humor.  As reported in ScienceDaily - we live in an information intense culture and face the constant risk of making errors or being deceived:

To compensate, humor rewards us for seeing through misinformation that has come close to taking us in. The pleasure we get (h) is calculated by multiplying the degree of misinformation perceived (m) by the extent to which the individual is susceptible to taking it seriously (s)

This equation for humor, H = M * S,  has clear implications for designers.

Works of art have a unique and powerful cognitive impact.  Ideally, we could reverse engineer them, figure out what key features make them tick and then use the key features to artify other objects.   Of course people have been trying to figure out what makes a work of art a work-of-art for a long time.  Most attempts have come from philosophers, artists or critical theorists. Now neuroscientists are getting into the act. Some of the work could be useful for designers.

Take for example the early work (1999), The Science of Art: A Neurological Theory of the Aesthetic Experience. The authors offer 8 key features that we find pleasing in works of art including the peak shift effect, isolation, grouping, contrast, symmetry, generic viewpoint, perceptual problem solving and art as metaphor. For a quick overview watch the 10-minute video on the 8 Laws of Artistic Experience.  After watching the video you will notice that at least 50% of the features work because they engage our brains in the active construction of the perceived object (e.g. grouping, perceptual problem solving, metaphor) in a way that results in reward rather than frustration or boredom.

There are many (and more recent) studies in the burgeoning field of neuroaesthetics. Very interested to hear from readers about other studies especially ones with implications for how to art up the design of other artifacts.

Check out The Strange Powers of the Placebo Effect. It is a well produced 3-minute video recap on the research about placebos, suggesting that size, color, cost, branding, tech-intensity and geographical location all matter when it comes to effectiveness. Placebos can improve sports performance, prevent death, relieve pain, help depression, become addictive and just make use feel better or worse.

Placebos are chemically and therapeutically inactive. They work by shifting our beliefs, reshaping our expectations, reframing our thinking and changing our behavior. They play off of our deepest mental models about authority and science and the need to do something rather than nothing.  They combine hope and fear in a one two punch and reduce complexity down to simple acts. Great cognitive design.

The amazing thing is that they produce life altering and reproducible outcomes. Sometimes they even work when someone knows they are taking a placebo!

The design question is how can we ethically harness these effects to produce positive outcomes in organizational and behavior change programs?  Said another way, how much of successful organizational behavior change is due to placebo effects rather than leadership with therapeutic impact? 

Sometimes the core of a cognitive design challenge rests on being able to detect deception. People lie, fake emotions, bluff, fib, tell partial truths and otherwise deceive in a wide variety of circumstances.   Being able to detect such deceptions reliably can be important at the office as well as at home.  If nothing else it builds up your emotional intelligence.  So I am always on the look out for scientific studies that zero in on the behavioral tells and give-away cognitive states of deception.

For example, two Canadian universities report on research in Law and Human Behavior that reveals for the first time insights into the behavioral cues for false remorse.

Those that fake remorse, or feeling sorry for what they have done, seem to:

 1. exhibit a greater range of emotional states over a given period of time than those that are sorry

2. transition directly from negative emotions to positive emotions bypassing the neural emotional states that normally come between if you are truly sorry

3. have relatively higher rate of speech interruptions

These are clear tells that we can learn to detect. Not surprising given the journal’s focus, most of the applications mentioned focus on law enforcement including forensic psychologist or judges attempting to determine remorse during sentencing.  It is easy to imagine other applications, for example a manager or HR professionals involved in the employee disciplinary process.

Interested to hear from readers about how they detect remorse or other forms of deception. How can disception detection be used in products, services or workplace improvements?

We have covered retro design, or creating artifacts that trigger/satisfy nostalgia, many times in the Cognitive Design blog. And why not? As our population ages a “yearning for the past” will naturally increase. Meeting that yearning through cognitive design is an important source of innovation that has been tapped in many product and service lines ranging from suits and cars to Coke bottles and office equipment.

 So I am always on the lookout for new insights into why or how nostalgic designs work. Recently found a post on the blog innovation playground that provides some insight into how Nostalgic Clues Create Emotion Connections.  My favorite part:

“A nice surprise for me is now I can download a McIntosh app for my iPad. It is very smart idea, not that the app will upgrade the sound from my iTunes, but the skins with the big blue VU meter brings moments of joy even when I am not in front of my McIntosh. Now I can listen to and playback music from my iPad within the classic McIntosh experience. I can now access to my digital music library in a simple elegant interface inspired by the line of McIntosh audio equipment. Genius idea!! And it is free too!!”

High-end (and old school) stereo amplifiers use to sport big blue meters to display information. They got burned into many peoples’ brains. This example also illustrates how we can wrap existing artifacts in a retro skin. A powerful technique.

Many product and some service innovators have embraced retro design but few if any organizational or workplace designers have.  A clear opportunity. For example, how might we retain talent or improve knowledge worker productivity by satisfying a yearning for the past on the job?

Watch someone deeply engrossed in a good novel, video game, Sudoku math puzzle or a Rubik’s cube. They are happily, even joyfully exerting massive mental effort. They do so without apparent stress because each of the items  mentioned delivers more mental energy in the form of novelty, meaning,  emotions and associations than it consumes in the form of decision making, cognitive load and self control. These effects work for group activities too as the all-to-addictive smart phone and online virtual worlds have demonstrated. The mental energy we get from technology-mediated but instant and robust social interaction is tremendous.  Millions of people are spending more time with their phones and in virtual worlds than any place else!

Organizations are still struggling to figure out how to harness mental energy and design work that release the potential of the Human brain.

The best results recently are crowdsourcing and open innovation.  In this case tasks and jobs are thrown open to anyone with an Internet connection and those that get net mental energy from doing them will self select. Efforts to gamify work, or redesign processes to include game-like features that drive up mental energy, are also on the rise.  Gamification is a powerful generator of mental energy and will surely impact the nature of work.

If you have any doubts on the importance of understanding the details of mental energy for improving knowledge work check out the post: Vastly Improve Mental Focus with Switching. It reports recent research that suggests maintaining cognitive performance on a task over time is more about spending a few seconds switching to a task that gives us a burst of mental energy or novelty than it is taking a rest break.   Deactivating and then reactivating goals rather than decreasing focus actually generates mental energy to help maintain focus.

We are hardwired from our brain chemistry up to our social nature to relentlessly seek mental energy.  In the life sciences mental energy is defined as the capacity and motivation to do cognitive work coupled with a subjective feeling of fatigue or vigor. Researchers in cognitive science and human factors have identified a handful of key variables that drive mental energy.  Tapping this emerging science to improve organizational performance is what the cognitive design blog is all about.

Our brains are designed to parse experience into three second windows.  It is a natural temporal unit of life.  Some psychological functions and basic human acts tend to take place in 3 second bursts – taking a breath, giving a hug, waving good bye, making a decision and how long an infant babbles. Of course not everything lasts just 3 seconds but it is the temporal unit we break longer processes into.

Researchers at Dundee University have recently confirmed that the 3-second-rule holds true for giving and receiving hugs:

“This research confirmed that a hug lasts about as long as many other human actions, and supports a hypothesis that we go through life perceiving the present in a series of about three-second windows.

The three second window defines an important constraint for those interested in designing communications or other artifacts for how the mind works.  It defines a natural maximum length for a single sound bite.

In cognitive design we focus on psychological moments of truth or those critical junctures of interaction where deep bonding or full-hearted rejection can occur. Every product, service or experience has them, and like first impressions, designers that ignore them often fail. Moments of truth are relatively small and can be very short in duration. All design challenges have at least three of them and some design problems can have more than a dozen.

For example, a product or service designed to change behavior and help us form new habits must be especially adept at handling psychological moments of truth. Motivating an initial attempt to change, helping us avoid self-regulation failures and springing back from a relapse must all be managed to create lasting behavior change.  A central variable in managing all of these moments of truth is mental energy. It takes energy to do work and behavior change requires a lot of mental work.

Recent research reported in the Journal of Consumer Research makes this very clear:

“When we feel fresh it’s relatively easy for us to focus on the primary features of a product, consider the outcome of a choice, and value the long-term benefits of an action,” the authors explain. “However when we feel depleted from exerting self-control, we start to attend to the non-central minor aspects, think about how feasible it is to engage in the choice, and sometimes emphasize short-term rewards.”

The idea of “feeling fresh” or the subjective experience of fatigue or energy, is one of the three components that make up mental energy.  The question is, how can we fail-safe the design of change programs against low mental energy events and circumstances?

Leaders and innovators are keen on creating intangible value – happiness, meaning, emotional engagement, loyalty, passion and even the WOW factor.  And why not, these mental states drive top performance, sales and marketplace success in the short and long haul.   So there is growing interest in understanding how employees, customers and partners feel or will feel given some proposed change in product, work practice or business model.  Knowing the emotional impact of a proposed change is savvy when it comes to creating, leveraging and protecting the intangible value of the firm.

Care should be taken when asking people how they will feel in the future.  Recent research indicates that we systematic neglect our own personality when predicting how we will feel about future events.

“Quoidbach and Dunn call this phenomenon “personality neglect,” which they tested in connection with the 2008 U.S. presidential election. In early October 2008, a large sample of Belgians predicted how they would feel the day after the U.S. presidential election if Barack Obama won and how they would feel if John McCain won. Then the day after the election, they reported how they actually felt, and completed personality tests. Nearly everyone in the study supported Obama, so most predicted they would be happy if he won.” 

But it turns out supporters with a grumpy disposition remain so despite the happiness they predicted for themselves and the fact that their candidate won.  They failed to factor their grumpy personality into an emotional forecast.

Care should be taken when designing surveys that involves emotional forecasting.  Much better to empathize rather than analyze or swing the other way and collect physiological data rather than verbal reports when it comes to understanding emotional states.