Cognitive Design

I recently found the Journal of Judgment and Decision Making.  Access to full content is free.  It covers many practical aspects of decision-making and provides designable insights. For example, in the new article, You Don’t Want to Know What You are Missing, the authors clearly demonstrate that when making a decision the more information we have about near-term benefits the less like we are to chose an alternative with the greatest long-term benefits. They put a sharper point to it:

“The present study reveals that, under the circumstances observed here, withholding information about local rewards from decision-makers can actually facilitate long-term optimal choice. “

Withholding information of course is just one option and might not be the best. Delaying it until longer-term options have been examined is an alternative.  No matter, this is just the type of insights cognitive designers seek and the journal appears to be full of them!

The cognitive science behind how and why consumers make the decisions they do has received a great deal of attention over the last 10 years.   Best selling book and several new fields such as neuromarketing and behavioral economics have emerged all of which hold important insights for cognitive designers.  If you have not folded these into your toolkit it is well worth the effort. I have found them useful not only to guide design for consumer decision-making but all manner of decision-making involving value.

For a quick introduction to some of the designable insights from behavioral economics, check out, A Marketer’s Guide to Behavioral Economics, written by Ned Welch in the McKinsey Quarterly.  Here are some of the key ideas:

 * Remove the viscerally pain in parting with money.The emotional pain caused by the thought of giving up something we value now, for some benefit in the future, even if it is a big benefit, is something we are not wired to do.  Ways to mitigate the pain of parting with money today include providng the option of delaying payment, categorize the payment in a more pleasant mental account (spare change, tax rebate or anything windfall-related) and use web/mobile phone based ways to make payment instant. 

* Use the power of default options to have the status quo bias work for you. Having employees opt-out rather than opt-in to a 401k plan or offering a base model with several premium features are typical examples. We tend to keep things as they are especially if it takes a lot of mental work to change them. 

* Avoid choice or other cognitive overloading. Too many decisions, too much to learn, too many open issues all mean I won’t decide to buy. 

* Make the choice to buy meaningful by properly positioning the product. If I can quickly and easily see the relative value of the article then buying it makes meaning for me.

In general, you want to be sure that the mental energy generated by making the decision is much greater than the mental work the consumer has to do to make it. Given a reasonable price and some need or want, tipping the balance of mental energy will make the sale every time!

We like to keep things the same, even if it means making errors or receiving less benefit from a situation.  This effect is called the status quo bias. For example, employees will accept the default asset allocation selection in a retirement plan while at the same time understanding that this will likely not produce the best return for them.  The amount of mental energy it takes to think through and select an alternative is not worth the potential future financial benefit.  Plus there is the potential negative emotional energy associated with taking responsibility for the choice and the worry and even anxiety that may produce.  This is not irrationality but it does illustrate the unique cognitive calculus of the status quo bias.  We are very sensitive to (put a huge premium on) the amount of mental energy things take. We don’t want our heads to blow up!

In theory, the harder a decision the more mental energy it requires and therefore the stronger the status quo bias should be.  A recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides evidence for that and even identifies the region of the brain that is active when we overcome the bias. This could prove an important result for those investing in a neuromarketing approach to complex products and services.

             [Image Source:  Sharpbrains] 

Having computers help us make decisions is a growing trend in both professional and consumer life.  Computers help us make decisions by providing access to information,  analyzing and displaying information, making recommendations,  critiquing human decisions and in some cases making the full decision automatically. The question is – do we make better decisions with or without computers? Do computers make good decision assistants?

The answer depends on if the  software has been designed to work in a naturalistic fashion (i.e. is designed for how our minds actually work). Or so argues, John Maule a professor of human decision making in a keynote speech at the 9th International Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making.

In his speech professor Maule points out that computers help us in many ways by overcoming our limitations for storing and processing information but warns:

 “…because many computer systems have been developed without a full understanding of how people actually think, computers can lead people to make bad decisions”

He points out that few systems allow us to balance intuitive and analytical approaches, help us avoid the confirmation bias and provide functional support for recognition-primed decision making versus a logical-rational approach.  All great clues for how to design people-machine systems that are optimized decision-makers!

I am often asked by clients to help design  presentations, documents or websites to influence decision-making. How do we present information to support the cognitive needs of different types of decision makers? One tool I have had great success with is the five-decision making styles discussed in Change the Way Your Persuade.

The five styles include charismatics, thinkers, skeptics, followers and controllers. I have found these profiles fit experience extremely well. The article if full of useful information for the cognitive designer including characteristics, mental models and prominent examples for each style.  Advice brimming with design implications for how to persuade each style is also given.

Many studies have shown that we may tend toward lying, cheating or other unethical behaviors if we believe our identities are hidden. Being anonymous can have a big impact on behavior. A new study, Good Lamps are the Best Police, show that darkness encourages self-interested or unethical behavior even when it does not hide our identity. You can find a PDF version of the study in draft form (for free) here.

The researchers suggest that the perception of darkness creates the illusion of anonymity in our minds even when we consciously know are identity will be known.

“Departing from this body of work, we suggest that darkness does more than simply produce conditions of actual anonymity. We contend that darkness may create a sense of illusory anonymity that disinhibits self-interested and unethical behaviors. Individuals in a room with slightly dimmed lighting or people who have donned a pair of sunglasses may feel anonymous not because the associated darkness significantly reduces others’ ability to see or identify them, but because they are anchored on their own phenomenological experience of darkness. When individuals in such circumstances experience darkness and, consequently, impaired vision, they generalize that experience to others, expecting that others will conversely have difficulty perceiving or seeing them.” 

Clear implications for the cognitive designer interesting in leveraging the effects of lighting and other devices that can create a false sense of anonymity.

Here is a classic cognitive design challenge

ScienceDaily’s, Of Girls and Geeks, reports on research done at the University of Washington that claims stereotypes about computer scientists/students are keeping many women and some men away from the field. They report:

“The stereotype of computer scientists as nerds who stay up all night coding and have no social life may be driving women away from the field, according to a new study published this month.”  And there is more: “When people think of computer science the image that immediately pops into many of their minds is of the computer geek surrounded by such things as computer games, science fiction memorabilia and junk food,” said Sapna Cheryan, a University of Washington assistant professor of psychology and the study’s lead author. “That stereotype doesn’t appeal to many women who don’t like the portrait of masculinity that it evokes.”

The research is interesting in its emphasis on the supporting artifacts and environmental factors (all the stuff computer geeks are surrounded by) and the role it plays in driving an “ambient feeling” of belonging or not.  A real clue for the cognitive designer.

The challenge for the cognitive designer is to create a mental model and supporting artifacts that gives computer science a “new brand”. One that is true to the field but that resonates with, or even accelerates, the thinking of female students.

Four new experimental studies confirm what many cognitive designers suspected – we are over confident when it comes to predicting our ability to control urges and impulses. Described in the research article, Restraint Bias: How the Illusion of Self-Restraint Promotes Impulsive Behavior, the authors get right to designable-insights:

“This biased perception of restraint had important consequences for people’s self-control strategies. Inflated impulse-control beliefs led people to overexpose themselves to temptation, thereby promoting impulsive behavior.”

 If you don’t have access to the journal, you can get more info in the blog post, Step Away from the Cookie Jar!

Be sure to test for the restraint bias in your next behavior change project.

I am often asked by clients and students, what can cognitive design do to help us with stereotypes? For example, consider the belief (and supporting mental models) that female drivers are way worse than male drivers.  Further, how can we differentiate harmful stereotypes from useful generalizations?

The first step, as is always the case in cognitive design, is to make sure we understand what cognitive psychology and neuroscience have to say on the matter.  Cognitive design starts with the best scientific model of the “workflow between the ears” that we can muster. Fortunately, there has been a lot of work on stereotypes lately. Take for instance the link that Gina Farag shared recently on Biases the Blind: The role of stereotypes in decision-making processes.  It is a treasure chest full of designable insights, including:

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Why do we make the choices we do?  Part of the answer has to do with dopamine or so argues an online article published in Trends in Cell Biology and reported on here.

“We found dopamine seems to have a role in determining the expected pleasure we will receive if we make a certain choice. We then use that information to make our choices.”

Dopamine is an import source of “mental energy” and as such this article supports the idea that we tend to act in ways to maximize our mental energy.

According to the article this effect lasted at least 24 hours in 80% of the subjects.  A powerful effect indeed which explains why it can sway even the most important life decisions.