Cognitive Design

According to research from Columbia Business School, we tend to artificially complicate our decision-making processes to match our expectation of hard a choice should be.  The harder we think a choice should be, the more complex we make the decision-making process. These artificial complications lead to poor decision outcomes and appear to infest a wide-range of life decisions about jobs, major purchases, choice of doctors and so on.  For example, I may pass on the best choice if it comes too quickly or easily when I expect the choice to be hard.

A release of EurekAlert sums of the key finding nicely:

“…. under certain conditions, consumers actually complicate their choices and bolster inferior options. Specifically, when an important decision seems too easy, consumers artificially reconstruct their preferences in a manner that increases choice conflict. The researchers conclude that when it comes to big decisions, people try to achieve a match between the expected effort of making a choice and the effort they think they should make in order to reach the decision. They term this the “effort compatibility principle”.?

Examples of preferences that shift to increase choice conflict included items such as size of the team you would work on when comparing job offers and if a doctor would make house calls or not when selecting doctors. These factors did not matter until a clearly superior choice was presented, making the decision “too easy” compared to the subject’s expectation.  Rather than select the best choice based on criteria they subject did prefer, they made irrelevant factors important to complicate the choice.

Whether this is the effort compatibility principle in action, or just represents we don’t really know what we prefer until pushed, the findings are important for cognitive designers.

Not only do we need to find and manage cognitive biases that may be at work to oversimplify or distort a decision-making process, we must also be on the look out for and manage expectation effects that can over complicate or distort a decision-making process.

We may be blinded to the easy win when we think the decision should be hard.

Source for Image: Retropolis Transit Authority.

The mismanagement of cognitive dissonance is a root cause of many of our toughest problems in the workplace.  It has to do with what we think and do when confronted with two or more conflicting beliefs.  For example, we all make mistakes and therefore have to confront the conflict – I am a good person but I did a bad thing. And we get plenty of mixed signals – I should take more creative risks but I don’t think I will succeed.

Cognitive dissonance is especially powerful (makes us feel very uncomfortable) when the conflicting beliefs are about ourselves. To relieve the discomfort we may self justify or rationalize, for example making excuses for our bad behavior rather than owning up. This is a slippery slope and can lead to good people falling into unethical or unwanted behavior patterns.

As cognitive designer we need to be able to spot when cognitive dissonance sits at the root of organizational problems and then find productive ways to vent the discomfort associated with it.

The confessional is an excellent example of how religion has institutionalized one way of managing cognitive dissonance that appears to block the cycle of self justification.

The general idea is to promote takening healthy ownership of mistakes, giving people a constructive way to discharge the discomfort associated with cognitive dissonance and advocating apologizing as a virtue not a weakness. Figuring out how to do this is essential for a wide-range of workplace programs as diverse as ethics and innovation.

For background and practical insights into the nature of cognitive dissonance and self justification check out, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me).  Suggest you start here for a good 10 minute overview but if you are serious about cognitive design study the book.

Interested to hear from readers that have factored cognitive dissonance into the design of workplace improvements and employee development.

We behave differently when being watched.  When watched most people will more consciously follow expected social norms.  This ranges from not littering and begin polite to working harder on a production line.  Now, according to research reported in the Scientific Amercian, this effect is induced when we are watched by eyes staring at us from a poster.  

“A group of scientists at Newcastle University, headed by Melissa Bateson and Daniel Nettle of the Center for Behavior and Evolution, conducted a field experiment demonstrating that merely hanging up posters of staring human eyes is enough to significantly change people’s behavior.” 

They put the posters in a cafeteria and found that they caused twice as many people to bus thier own trays and otherwise clean up after themselves.  This is a statistically significant effect with strong implications for designers.

Source of Image: Sky News

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.

Cognitive designs emphasize features and functions that put us in a particular frame of mind. The goal is to use interaction to create specific perceptions, thoughts, feelings and action propensities in anyone that comes in contact with the design.  In short, strong cognitive designs create a distinctive think-and-feel experience.

One example of a distinctive think-and-feel is illusion or putting us in the frame of mind to believe something about the world that is not true.  For some excellent examples check out the finalists in the 2011 Best Illusions of the Year Contest.  I especially like Silencing Awareness by Background Motion (shown).

Click on the image and go watch the video. Did the dots seem to stop changing color when the object rotated? If so, you experienced an illusion. Watch the video again only this time stare at a single dot. Watch closely as the object rotates and you will see that the dot continues to change color.   Once you see it the illusion will fail to work.

One way to create preference for something is with lighting.   We like things better when they are illuminated  from the left.  This is true for many things from paintings to advertisements.  The position of the source of light  also impacts cognitive task performance. For example, left side lighting improves our ability to identify shapes and perform visual search.

The leftward lighting bias is strong enough to factor into a cognitive design. For evidence, take the article just published in the research journal, Laterality on Leftward Lighting in Advertisements. The authors claim:

 ”Overall, participants indicated that they preferred advertisements with leftward lighting and were more likely to purchase these products in the future than when the same products were lit from the right.” 

The article provides an excellent synopsis of other leftward lighting biases with pointers into the literature.

 Interested to hear from readers that have used this bias in an application.

When predicting outcomes most people tend to overestimate the chances of a positive outcome and underestimate the chances of a negative outcome. This optimism bias is at the root of gambling fallacies and shapes an array of predictions ranging from ill effects of smoking to corporate earning estimates and how well you will do on a test.

For cognitive designers working in the area of decision support, the overconfidence bias is a tricky issue. You want to mitigate its effect but not make your solution too conservative.

One way of mitigating its effects was recently uncovered by researchers at Duke University Health Center.  Using brain scanning studies they found that the overconfidence bias is magnified when decision maker do not get enough sleep.

“The scientists showed, using a functional MRI, that a night of sleep deprivation leads to increased brain activity in brain regions that assess positive outcomes, while at the same time, this deprivation leads to decreased activation in the brain areas that process negative outcomes.”

This suggest making economic decision early in the day or when fully rested may help to avoid the effects of the optimism bias.

When we decide, solve a problem or learn something new, a cognitive bias is involved. Sometimes the bias plays a strong role in determining the outcome. Cognitive designers must be aware of the biases at play in an application and then created features and functions to either leverage the bias (e.g. buying lottery tickets) or mitigate the bias (e.g. employee hiring decisions). Over 100+ biases have been cataloged but I am always on the lookout for new ones.

For example, researchers at Brown University have a few studies that suggest we reason illogically when presented with weak evidence.  They found:

We tend to except predictions with no evidence more readily than we do predictions that have weak supporting evidence.

Said another way, we tend to reject predictions with a weak case over those with no case! Normally we expect more evidence to increase the degree of belief.  Why does this weak evidence effect work? The researcher suggest:

“Give people a weak reason and they’ll focus too much on it. Give people no evidence and they’ll supply their own probably more convincing reason to believe that the outcome is likely.”

This has important implications for cognitive designers especially those working on application involving persuasion. For the full article see When Good Evidence Goes Bad.

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.

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.