Cognitive Design

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.

Most of the judgments we make are strongly determined by cognitive biases of one type or the other.  The more important a decision the bigger the role biases play. Our efforts to mitigate the effects of biases by collecting data, using analytics and otherwise trying to be fact-based often make things worse by adding cost and delays while failing to increase objectivity. Think about performance appraisals.

Biases are so deeply entrenched into how we make decisions, especially in an organizational setting, that scholars have noted that we have certain styles or patterns in the way we use them to decide.  For example, decision-makers can be thinkers, skeptics, controllers or followers depending upon the cognitive biases and psychological needs they bring to bear on the process.

Finding and understanding the psychological needs behind a bias is often the key breakthrough in a cognitive design project. So I am always on the look out for new scientific studies on the topic. Take for example the study When You Dislike Patients, Pain is Taken Less Seriously that found:

Results indicated lower pain estimations as well as lower perceptual sensitivity toward pain (i.e., lower ability to discriminate between varying levels of pain expression) with regard to patients who were associated with negative personal traits.

Dislike biases the perception of pain in others, at least in a clinical setting when patient’s express high-intensity pain.  We tend to discount the pain of others we don’t like.

While it is not clear how general this finding is, it is relevant for cognitive designers working in areas of clinical communication, pain management and ER medicine.

Source of image: Human Factors International

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?

One of the big findings in the last 20 years about how minds work has to do with memory. Memory is far from an objective record of things. Memory is dynamic and its contents are shaped and recreated by expectations, cognitive biases and social pressure.  These memory distortion factors are so powerful that not only do they change content they can spawn false memories that are stronger than the original.  A good example was recently documented by researchers exploring how social influence creates false memories.

What they found in a nutshell is that 70% of the time we will change our  memory of an event, even one we are confident of, if presented with opposing points of view from other members that participated in the event.  The social nature of the opposing point of view is reinforced with social-media style photos.  What is shocking is that almost 50% of time when we  are told that the opposing view was just a spoof (not true), we still don’t revert to the original memory.

What others think can play a dominate role in the formation and recall of memory. This has strong implications for cognitive designers working in the areas of decision-making and education.

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.