Cognitive Design

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.

Cigarettes have been characterized as a nicotine delivery system. There are over a billion people that smoke them worldwide.  It is increasing. The World Bank Group estimates that between 80,000 – 100,000 young people take up smoking cigarettes per day. According to the American Heart Association about 49 million adults in the US smoke them.

A new type of cigarette, called the electronic cigarette, e-cigarette or just the e-cig, has hit the market. It is smokeless. Instead of burning tobacco you use a battery to vaporize and inhale a nicotine solution.   It is unregulated. It can in theory be consumed where smoking is banned.

These new electronic nicotine delivery systems are just now being studied. I found some research on EurekAlert! that is sounding an alarm:

To address this question, researchers at the University of California, Riverside evaluated five e-cigarette brands and found design flaws, lack of adequate labeling, and several concerns about quality control and health issues. They conclude that e-cigarettes are potentially harmful and urge regulators to consider removing e-cigarettes from the market until their safety is adequately evaluated.”

There are more than five brands on the market. Although I could not find a formal market study, there are newspaper articles that claim the market is growing fast. Ironically, the high price of traditional cigarettes have made the e-cig technology affordable.

According to Smoke Power here is how they work:

 ”… the user inhales on the electronic cigarette, this causes an air flow sensor to signal to the inbuilt microprocessor, that in turn activates the atomizer. The atomizer converts the liquid nicotine in the cartridge into a vapour (by atomization), which is digested by the user. Simultaneously, a vapor is released from the glycol by the atomizer to resemble ‘smoke’. “

They include tobacco flavoring, look like a cigarette and produce vapor like smoke so they are trying to meet the cognitive needs of smokers with the design.

Interested to hear from readers that have used e-cigs or that have strong opinions about them.

Source of Image: Electronic Cigarette Comparison

Organizations are very interested in the ethical behaviors of leaders, employees, customers, suppliers and everyone in the value chain.  Significant time and money is spent on ethics training and programs designed to enhance compliance – often without achieving the desired results.

Clients and students ask, how can we use cognitive design to enhance the effectiveness of ethics training and programs?

The key is to approach it as a behavior change challenge and understand the underlying moral cognition that drives it.

For example, consider the research just published in Social Psychological and Personality Science by the University of Toronto on the Cognition of Moral Behavior.  

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Fresh from the Association of Psychological Science comes the claim that Anger Makes People Want Things More. Here is the experimental setup:

“For the study, each participant watched a computer screen while images of common objects, like a mug or a pen, appeared on the screen. What they didn’t realize was that immediately before each object appeared, the screen flashed either a neutral face, an angry face, or a fearful face. This subliminal image tied an emotion to each object. At the end of the experiment, the participants were asked how much they wanted each object.”

Subjects picked the objects with the angry face prime over the neutral and fearful face prime. They did not report feeling anger towards the more desirable objects only that they liked them.

Having choice creates cognitive load. Making decisions can take a lot of mental energy. Having many options that are roughly similar or many that are wildly different can lead to choice overload.

As cognitive designers we need to understand how to engineer choice-making and more basically when offering a choice creates value.  So I am always on the lookout for new scientific studies that might help us understand when choice is important.  An upcoming article in the Journal of Consumer Research, Why Making Our Own Choice is More Satisfying When Pleasure is The Goal, offers some designable insights:

“Results consistently show that the outcome of a self-made choice is more satisfying than the outcome of an externally made choice when the goal is hedonic, but when the goal is utilitarian there is no difference in satisfaction between choosers and non-choosers,” the authors write. “A lack of choice feels less like a deprivation of the capacity to determine one’s own fate when the goal choice is utilitarian than when it is hedonic.”

To over simplify, we get more value from choice when pleasure is involved. Having pleasurable choices gives us the opportunity to savior which offsets the energy required to do the mental work of making the choice.  

As is always the case, satisfaction or cognitive performance improves when the mental energy you get out of an interaction is more than you have to put into it.

Believe it or not, the blue dot on the top of the cube and the one on the shaded side to the right are exactly the same.   I borrowed this image from  Wrong By Design. There are other examples that are fun to check out.

The image illustrates an important concept in cognitive design namely:

when designing for how minds work there is nearly always at least one powerful cognitive bias at work. You need to uncover it and decide to mitigate, leverage or ignore it.

Perception, memory, learning, decision-making, problem solving, creativity and all other mental processes are loaded with limitations, quirks and biases that must be understood if we are claiming our designs are optimized for how minds work.  

Magic, music you cannot forget, lottery tickets, movies that make us cry and viral videos all leverage well-known cognitive biases. Cognitive biases left unchecked lead to poor decision-making, the high failure rate of planned change and safety issues.   We now have catalogs of dozens of known biases. Our first step as cognitive designers is to make them as visible as the blue dot in the cube.

Imagine surfing online and running into a banner that reads “click now to contribute $1 to your nest egg. It will more that triple by your retirement age!”.  A buck and a click now for three bucks when I am old, sounds a bit boring. Would I do it?  I asked that to a group of 20 middle-age surfers (45 – 55) and 85% said yes.  They also wanted a widget to track contributions, projected returns and performance relative to others (friends) that are using from this surf-and-save offering.

Once you used surf-and-save for a while the pull to save impulsively will magnify.  For example, the widget would use historical data (online behavior) and your profile to illustrate the financial impact of saving a $1.5 instead of $1.  This could be big money if you spend considerable time online and don’t plan to retire soon. Plus it would likely let you zoom ahead of your friends!

A prototype of surf-and-save does not require a major investment. It would be interesting to find the online contexts and widget behaviors that produced the greatest conversion rates for saving impulsively.

Why can’t  savings be like experience points in social games? Millions of people spend hours a week in online virtual worlds (e.g. World of Warcraft) earning experience points so they can upgrade their avatar, buy virtual goods or enter a new region of the game. Why not use the same mechanism to save real dollars for retirement?

We are already spending a billion real dollars for virtual goods and sponsors are giving virtual dollars to online citizens willing to do simple tasks such as watching videos and completing quizzes. The virtual and real economies are colliding.   Being online means the cost of doing simple financial transactions approaches zero. This means saving a little impulsive many times can be done cost effectively.

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When changing behaviors the onset of a craving can defeat the best intentions, strongest will and well-funded health program. Cravings are specific and powerful. They have more visceral force than emotions or drive states such as hunger.  In doing cognitive design for behavior change I always ask – are cravings a factor?

According to research just published in the journal, Current Directions in Psychological Sciences, and reported on here, mental imagery plays a key role in the cognition of forming and defeating food cravings.

“Results of one study showed that the strength of participants’ cravings was linked to how vividly they imagined the food. Mental imagery (imagining food or anything else) takes up cognitive resources, or brain power. Studies have shown that when subjects are imagining something, they have a hard time completing various cognitive tasks. In one experiment, volunteers who were craving chocolate recalled fewer words and took longer to solve math problems than volunteers who were not craving chocolate. These links between food cravings and mental imagery, along with the findings that mental imagery takes up cognitive resources, may help to explain why food cravings can be so disruptive: As we are imagining a specific food, much of our brain power is focused on that food, and we have a hard time with other tasks.”

Additional research illustrates how imagery can be used to defeat a food craving:

“The results of one experiment revealed that volunteers who had been craving a food reported reduced food cravings after they formed images of common sights (for example, they were asked to imagine the appearance of a rainbow) or smells (they were asked to imagine the smell of eucalyptus).” 

This is good news for the cognitive designer looking for specific tools for managing the effects of cravings. It also suggest a more fundamental insight – indulging in mental images burns significant cognitive resources.

In a later post I will explore the role of supernormal stimuli in creating cravings.

We gamble because we experience the hope of winning, in some cases such as a lottery ticket, winning more than we could ever otherwise hope to obtain. The payback for gambling is hope and dopamine.  

A recent study in the Journal of Neuroscience, Gambling Severity Predicts Midbrain Response to Near-Miss Outcomes, provides additional detail. The study found that a near-miss (or the perception of almost winning) produces the similar neurological reward as a win with the effect being most intense in problem gamblers. Check out this article on the Telegraph for an overview of the study.

The continued hope of winning is what keeps us gambling because the mental energy (excitement, adrenaline and dopamine) is nearly equivalent to what we get for a win.

A recent research study on consumer decision making found:

“When decisions are difficult because the choices are equally appealing, people often become more positive in their attitudes and behaviors toward their chosen option after they choose it. But the authors found that this enhancement of a product is surprisingly fragile, and collapses easily in the face of even minor negative information about it.”

This “positivity bubble” (as the researchers describe it) is no surprise to cognitive designers. It comes from our need to get more mental energy out of an interaction then we put in.  Making a choice especially between options that are very similar requires a lot of mental energy.   To compensate we hype-up the value of the choice we make to create compensating meaning and positive emotional energy.  The positivity bubble gives us energy to balance out or exceed what we used in making the decision. As it is primarily hype it bursts at the first sign of conflicting information. This collapse can lead to remorse and long-term dissatisfaction.  And this can happen when the stakes are highest. To quote the study:

“Difficult decision scenarios with heightened stakes—such as shopping for expensive durable goods, choosing a gift for a loved one, or choosing a job, college, or house—are precisely those in which people would most hope to have accurate and stable attitudes,” the authors write. “Perversely, our results suggest that in these cases their attitudes might actually be the most fragile and bubble-like, appearing strong but actually quite vulnerable to collapse.”

This highlights a moment of truth from a cognitive design standpoint.  A case where if we don’t properly manage the psychological need for mental energy we may in fact end up with a bad case of decision remorse. To take a deeper dive check out the article, Fragile Enhancement of Attitudes Following Difficult Decisions.