Cognitive Design

Successful innovations offer features we really want in an easy to use package that also delight the senses.  Wildly successful innovations go beyond core functionality, usability and sensorial design to inspire, enlighten and energize by moving our hearts and minds. But how do we understand the hearts and minds of others in order to successfully innovate?  One way is to use the science of character strengths.

Character strengths, for example humility, curiosity or bravery not only help define who we are but are windows into what is most likely to move our hearts and minds.   Fortunately, we can cost effectively measure character strengths in sufficient detail to inform a design or innovation process. The best resource I have found (and have blogged on them before) is the VIA Institute of Character.  Their model includes six main categories (wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence) with 24 specific strengths.

In about 30-40 minutes you can take a personal survey online for free.  It identifies your signature character strengths or the keys to getting your heart and mind going.  You can use the instrument with your clients or employees (approx $40 per survey). They also offer plenty of training and support options for learning to use the instrument.

I have used this framework to successfully deconstruct popular designs and forward engineer applications several times.   My work is still in the early stages.  I would like to hear from readers interested or experienced in using a character-based approach to defining needs and features for cognitive design.

Image Source: Strengths Picture 

A boost in self-esteem over sex, food, alcohol, friends or pay. 

Often the key to great cognitive design comes from insight into deeply-felt and unsatisfied psychological needs (intellectual, affective, motivation, volitional) and finding a low friction way of satisfying them.  For example, lottery tickets give us hope of “making in big in life”. And Facebook gives us an endless stream of gossip or inside information into the lives of others that we can use to evaluate ourselves.

So I am always on the lookout for new scientific studies that may reveal deeply felt and potentially unsatisfied needs. For example, the Journal of Personality just published a study that found:

“…people valued boosts to their self-esteem more than they valued eating a favorite food and engaging in a favorite sexual activity. Study 2 also showed that people valued self-esteem more than they valued drinking alcohol, receiving a paycheck, and seeing a best friend. Both studies found that people who highly valued self-esteem engaged in laboratory tasks to boost their self-esteem.”

The study group is US college students and boosts to self-esteem include, for example,  a high grade or receiving a complement.

This finding has strong implications for anyone looking to improve education or design products and services for college students.  It likely holds for other groups as well but what counts as a self-esteem boost is different.

Image Source: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

There is a great post on the PsyBlog summarizing 20 principles for changing minds. While we have covered nearly all of the principles for persuasion in other posts, pulling a list like this together has some real value for cognitive designers.

Very interested to hear from readers on how best to implement some of these principles and which are the most powerful.

I am often asked by clients and students how cognitive design can be used to improve the effectiveness of coaching.  Or more specifically, what findings from cognitive science can help us coach employees in the workplace, patients in healthcare and students in the classroom more effectively?

These are important questions as coaching programs have sprung up everywhere, are deeply entangled in cognitive needs (intellectual, affective, motivational and volitional) and don’t always produce the outcomes we want.

So I am always on the look out for good scientific studies that have designable insights for improving the coaching process. Take for example, the work at Case Western Reserve University that clearly demonstrates Coaching with Compassion can Light up Human Thoughts.  Researchers are using brain scanning to study the neural signatures of different coaching styles and their impacts on outcomes.  A key finding:

 ”Boyatzis, a faculty member at Weatherhead School of Management, and Jack, director of the university’s Brain, Mind and Consciousness Lab, say coaches should seek to arouse a Positive Emotional Attractor (PEA), which causes positive emotion and arouses neuroendocrine systems that stimulate better cognitive functioning and increased perceptual accuracy and openness in the person being coached, taught or advised. Emphasizing weaknesses, flaws, or other shortcomings, or even trying to “fix” the problem for the coached person, has an opposite effect.”

Perhaps not so surprising to folks that are good at coaching.  But the fact is we normally coach using a Negative Emotional Attractor by focusing on what is wrong and trying to “fix” the person.

Coaching, according to this study, tends to produce the best outcomes when the person being coached feels inspired and compassion flowing from the person doing the coaching.

“By spending 30 minutes talking about a person’s desired, personal vision, we could light up (activate) the parts of the brain 5-7 days later that are associated with cognitive, perceptual and emotional openness and better functioning,” Boyatzis said. 

You still provide corrective suggestions as a coach but you must do so from a genuine sense of compassion versus critical judgement.  Coaching is framed in terms of making changes to achieve the individual’s dreams and ambitions. It is grounded in a caring, empathetic and emotional intelligent interaction between parties. It is not technical compliance with the duties of some formally specified coaching process.

Our minds open to influence in the presence of an informed, caring voice that has our best interests at heart.   Compassionate coaches, just like compassionate leaders, doctors or teachers, will be the most effective in changing how we feel, think and behave.

To tackle coaching from a cognitive design perspective we must first discover, cultivate and unleash compassion for helping others. Without that, what follows will fail to light up our brains.

Scams targeting older adults come in many shapes and sizes.  Unfortunately, they work amazing well and often go unreported out of fear and shame. Many assume that senior scams work because older adults have experienced some form of cognitive decline. Senior scams are designed to exploit the impaired decision-making, reading and memory skills of older adults.

Recent research paints a more complex picture. One with strong implications for those designing solutions to defeat the scamers.  For an excellent summary see the article in Scientific American on the Psychology Behind Seniors’  Susceptibility to Scams. They point out that it is not just cognitive decline that is being exploited but shifting cognitive needs. It turns out that older adults worry less about losing money because:

“As people age and begin to feel that their time is limited, some researchers suggest, they seek out emotional fulfillment. This tendency to focus on the positive changes the decisions older people make.”

This has been confirmed with controlled studies and brain scans:

“When expecting a loss, however, younger and older adults responded differently. Younger adults reported being more upset and showed higher blood flow in the insula, a part of the brain implicated in negative emotions. As the amount of money at stake increased, so did negative feelings and insula activation. The older adults, on the other hand, didn’t feel as bad as younger adults did, and showed less activation in the insula.”

Senior scams are working because they exploit this positivity effect. This is not a form of cognitive decline but signals a shift in cognitive need as we age. And there are likely others. For example, in my cognitive design workshop several teams have observed that reading the mail can become a ritualized and high-meaning event for seniors. 

As with all applications of cognitive design, we need to understand the underlying cognitive processes and psychological needs (intellectual, affective, motivational, volitional) to create solutions that move hearts and minds.  So far the scammers have figured this out better than those that would prevent them.

Doing cognitive design for employees is an excellent way to approach workplace effectiveness.  The key is to understand how employees think-and-feel about work. What psychological (intellectual, affective, motivational and volitional) needs do employees have in the workplace?  How do your HR and management services and policies satisfy these needs better than competitors? These questions are intensely important when it comes to talent management.

There is not likely one answer for most firms. Indeed, how employees think-feel-and-do work seems to differ along generational lines. Most large corporations have intergenerational workforces. So I am always on the look out for generational workforce studies that provide scientific insights into the cognitive needs of employees. For example, a new study just published in the Journal of Management, Generational Differences in Work Values, provides several designable insights.  They analyze the intrinsic and extrinsic values that three generations attach to work. Generations include Boomers (1946- 1964), GenX (1965 – 1981) and GenMe (1982 -1999).  

Big shifts are in the works.  Most notable is the decline in the intrinsic value of work and the rise in importance of leisure time.

Boomers live to work and GenMe works to live.

This graph summarizes some of the details of the shift nicely: 

On an HR blog I also found an interesting contrast of the motivational differences between generations. While the time frame on the cohorts are slightly different and GenMe = GenY the two studies paint a similar picture.  

I do see important differences. For example, is the best reward for GenMe leisure time or meaningful work? Also, I suspect text messaging is the key communication mode for GenY.

Interested to hear from readers that have seen other empirical studies that shed light on the shifting psychographics of work.

In cognitive design we must make every effort to understand the psychological needs of others. These include emotional, intellectual, motivational and volition or those involved in making active conscious choices. Discovering deeply felt yet unrecognized cognitive needs is often enough to light the way to block buster designs.

So I am always on the lookout for interesting new ways to probe the mind and uncover new cognitive needs.  A colleague recently shared a link to a site that catalogs a growing movement around expressing with picture and text why you do what you do or WYDWYD for short.   The main site it here and an interesting collection of responses is here.

According to Wired, WDYDWYD started in 2004 and has been growing since. This signals a clear existential need people have to express their purpose in life to others. Take note cognitive designers. It is also interesting as technique to probe cognitive needs. Clearly each purpose statement reveals specific inclinations and associated needs and wants at the psychological level. WDYDWYD might be a simple, low-cost and fun way to help surface deep cognitive needs!

Priming is a powerful psychological technique.  It involves exposure to a specific stimulus (often repeatedly), a short delay and then the completion of a task. How you complete the task is influenced by the stimulus which “primes you” to act in a certain way.  You have an implicit memory of the stimulus which is used to complete the task. It can be surprising powerful especially when the priming stimulus is carefully selected and we are doing the task in automatic mode.

For example, a recent research study from the University of Pennsylvania found that priming can influence how we decide to spend our time.  For specifics see, Thoughts About Time Inspire People to Socialize:

“A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people who are made to think about time plan to spend more of their time with the people in their lives while people who think about money fill their schedules with work, work, and—you guessed it—more work.” 

Being primed to think about time influences a decision to socialize versus a prime about money which influences a decision to work. This effect was found in both a lab and real world setting.

Emotional intelligence is our ability to spot, understand and manage emotional states in ourselves and others.  It has been a topic of increasing importance to leaders but has yet to have a game-changing impact on workforce management.

Our level of emotional intelligence, or emotional quotient (EQ), can be measured and has been found to correlate strongly to high performance in some domains.  An interesting recent study by the University of Haifa looked at 809 employees in four companies and found:

“Meisler says the study indicates employees with a high level of emotional intelligence were more satisfied with their jobs and were more committed to their organizations. They also had fewer undesirable work attitudes — such as burnout, intention to leave and negligent behavior.”

This suggests that measuring EQ may be a useful tool for general workforce management. For the cognitive designer it implies that EQ measurements may provide insight into the unique cognitive needs and characteristics of employees.

Very interested to hear from designers that use EQ measurements as way to uncover cognitive needs.

The PsyBlog has an interesting post offering 10 psychological insights into the use of Twitter. Some may be relevant for cognitive designers working on twitter applications. Here are a few examples:

1. Most people join because their friends did and its free
2. Trends (specific topics) last only a few days
3. Tweets are most babble (41%) and conversational (38%)
4. Most people just watch (follow) and on average only send one tweet, ever!

Interested to hear from readers that have found scientific studies of Twitter that give psychological insight into its use.