Cognitive Design

Most people reading this blog post will have an avatar. Many will have several. These include the images and characters we upload and create for our blogs, email profiles and on the social networking and game site we frequent. Avatars range from traditional photos (e.g. head shots)  to custom images all the way to personalized animated characters.  Many of the people we interact with on-line will only know us visually through our avatars.

The avatars we select or create can impact how we think, feel and behave in cyberspace.  The effects can be pronounced.  For example, recent research at Penn State suggests that when we customize our avatars we impact our perceptions on the virtual environments we are in. More specifically:

“A group of students who saw that a backpack was attached to an avatar that they had created overestimated the heights of virtual hills, just as people in real life tend to overestimate heights and distances while carrying extra weight…”

This leads to the belief that you would have more difficulty climbing a virtual hill.

Students that were assigned an avatar with a backpack did not feel this way. This suggest we are really putting ourselves into our avatars (agency) as we customize and design them.

Bottom line for designers-    tuning when and how people can customize their avatars may produce specific cognitive effects.

In the cognitive design blog we focus on how minds (individual, group and machine) actually work and how we can turn those insights into innovations.   Take for example, food psychology. How we think-and-feel about food controls our consumption behavior and our body mass index.  A  PLOS research article illustrates this nicely:

“Consumption with large sips led to higher food intake, as expected. Large sips, that were either fixed or chosen by subjects themselves led to underestimations of the amount consumed. This may be a risk factor for over-consumption. Reducing sip or bite sizes may successfully lower food intake, even in a distracted state.”

The effects were significant. For example, they found small bites led to 30% reduction in consumption if subjects were not distracted by watching a movie while they ate.

It appears that our minds are at some level deciding if we are full or not by counting how many bites or sips we take.  Change the size of the bite or sip or interfere with our ability to count and you have a pre-programmed impact on consumption.

A belief in a god or gods and the institutions and practices that go along with it are a powerful psychological experience for millions of people daily. The opportunities for cognitive designers to learn from and enhance that experience are numerous. Some examples:

• Are Megachurches Masterstrokes of Cognitive Design?
• Are Believers Better Self-Regulators?
• Design Inspirations from Extreme Mental States 

So I am always on the look out for scientific studies on the nature of religious beliefs, experiences and artifacts with insights that are useful for cognitive designers.

Take for example, the recent article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences on the Origins of Religious Disbelief.   The researchers argue that non-belief flows from cognitive, motivational and cultural learning sources and takes four different forms.  An excellent framework for cognitive designers working on programs to convert non-believers. The article also catalogs some 9 mechanisms involved in driving the intensity of religious beliefs that could be used to inform the design of religious artifacts and experiences.

I am interested to hear from readers that are working on applications in religion.

Source of Image: Religious Symbols

A placebo is a substance with no medicinal properties that can nevertheless have therapeutic effects on some people.  Sometimes called sugar pills or sham medicine, they produce real changes in our psychology, bodies and well being.   How and why they work is a bit of a mystery but recent research  led by the University of Michigan Medical School suggests personality factors play a role.

Researcher tested a dozen healthy subjects for a response to a pain placebo. They found angry or hostile type subjects showed little response whereas those that were resilient, trustworthy and altruistic showed the best response. To quote:

“We ended up finding that they greatest influence came from a series of factors related to individual resiliency, the capacity to withstand and overcome stressors and difficult situations. People with those factors had the greatest ability to take environmental information — the placebo — and convert it to a change in biology.”

The change in biology here refers to the fact that they are generating natural pain killers at multiple sites in their brain.

While this study needs to be replicated on larger groups the fact that adaptive personality traits make the best use of placebos will catch some by surprise.

As we have reported elsewhere on the Cognitive Design Blog placebo effects are widespread and real. They even work with processes or rituals that don’t involve pills, injections or clinical equipment.   The door is wide-open for some creative cognitive designers to develop ethical uses of the placebo effect to address any number of organizational and individual challenges. How about a pill or ritual that accelerates organizational change or doubles my creativity?

The perception of time plays a critical role in service and experience design. Things can seem to take forever or end way too soon for a variety of psychological reasons.  So I am always on the look out for new cognitive science studies on time perception that have implications for designers.

For instance , recent research has uncovered that if we know two events are causally connected we expect them to be close together in time.   One implication is that our knowledge of causation can seriously distort our perception of time and therefore the nature of experience we have.  An example  from the research:

” if people believe that they (or someone or something else) are in charge, the time appears to pass faster.”

Another example is the time experience after pushing an elevator button. If I push it, the elevator seems to take a long time. On the other hand if you push it, the elevator appears to arrive promptly.

From a cognitive design standpoint  this puts a premium on understanding the cause-and-effect assumptions we use to access the features in products and services.  There is an opportunity to leverage (not change) them to use temporal binding and create a more positive experience.

I am interested to hear from readers that  have used design to warp time experience. What causal assumptions did you leverage?

When selecting among alternatives, the order in which the choices are presented and the speed at which the decision is made, strongly shape the outcome.

While this is likely old news to readers of the Cognitive Design Blog, researchers at the Haas School of Business sum it up nicely:

“The study found that especially in circumstances under which decisions must be made quickly or without much deliberation, preferences are unconsciously and immediately guided to those options presented first”

This primacy effect may be rooted in evolution and it has implications for cognitive designers.   In a fast-decision environment you can change the order of choices to nudge decision-makers in a specific direction. On the other hand, if a specific choice is not preferred, i.e. making a choice among the alternatives needs to be considered, you need to add safeguards to the process to mitigate the primacy bias.

I’ve been asking many students that question lately. 

This semester I am a visiting instructor of physics at Indiana University Purdue University in Fort Wayne (IPFW). I love physics and teaching it is loaded with fundamental challenges in cognitive design. In many ways, the physics classroom is a cognitive design laboratory.  I’m hopeful the lessons I learn there will transfer to my consulting efforts in the workplace.

One of the challenges involved in helping others learn physics is correcting deeply held misconceptions about how the world works. From seemingly simple ideas about position, velocity, force and acceleration to more basic assumptions about the nature of space and time, our common sense is loaded with conceptual mistakes. We have the same challenges in the workplace only they have to do with how employees think about innovation, customers, quality and other basic notion that drives performance.

So I am always on the lookout for new scientific research into the memory of deeply held but false beliefs.  For example, Duke University just published some interesting research on the hypercorrection effect.   They found student’s confidence in their answer plays a big role in how they correct misunderstandings.  The higher the confidence the more readily the student makes a correction but without reinforcement the effect lasts about a week. More specifically:

“Although high-confidence errors may be easily corrected in the short-run, our findings suggest that one presentation of feedback is not enough to produce a long-lasting correction of deeply entrenched false knowledge,” Butler said. “Without further practice, high-confidence errors seem to be more likely to return over time.”

This means that some deeply held beliefs might not really be that hard to change, at least initially. From a teaching standpoint there is a premium on knowing  which errors occur with high confidence.  Such topics require additional work even if the initial error appears to be corrected.

How can we collect and use confidence-in-response information in the evaluation and learning process?

Image: Mark Master’s Laser Lab at IPFW.

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.

Researchers at Arizona State University have found that our mood or frame of mind can impact how averse we are to losses. This in turn biases how we make basic financial decisions.  Its the preference for a bird in the hand versus two in the bush.

In the study  subjects were put in both a mating and protection frame of mind and revealed a shift in loss aversion with some gender differences.

 “For men in a mating frame of mind, loss aversion completely disappeared and they became more focused on wins than losses. For women, on the other hand, mating motivation led them to be even more loss averse, to focus less on possible gains and even more on the pain of loss.”

The researcher suggest that such biases are not irrational but reflect a deep logic rooted in evolution. Women have a bigger stake in mating because they bear the children.

No matter, the research illustrates the central importance of understanding “frame of mind” or think-and-feel and the role it plays in determining important outcomes.